The motion to disapprove the administration of Education Senator Astrid-Sabine Busse (SPD), tabled by the CDU, did not – unsurprisingly – find a majority in the House of Representatives on Thursday. Only the CDU and AfD voted in favor of the application, the factions of the red-green-red government coalition voted against.
The FDP abstained – but expressly not because they secretly agreed to the motion, as the deputy parliamentary group leader and education spokesman for the Liberals, Paul Fresdorf, assured the CDU: “The governing coalition should smash it with its own majority.” The motion, however, was “ Populism” and a tried and tested scam by the CDU.
Demands for resignation, special representatives or motions for disapproval, “that’s the color box,” Fresdorf scoffed. The results of 26 years of social-democratic education policy are “catastrophic”, but buses with their short term in office cannot be held responsible.
In their application, the Christian Democrats had accused buses of indifference and lack of ideas. In particular, they criticized that the education senator was doing too little to build schools and counteract the shortage of teachers. She “failed completely, most recently with the admission that up to 1,000 teachers will be missing in the coming school year” and generally seem “lost” in crises, the application said.
“Ms. Busse, you gambled away our trust,” said the education policy spokeswoman for the CDU, Katharina Günther-Wünsche. AfD deputy Thorsten Weiß accused buses of being just an “administrator of the disaster”.
The coalition factions did not send a specialist politician to justify their rejection of the motion for disapproval against the senator, but Torsten Schneider, the parliamentary manager of the Social Democrats, to the lectern. Schneider defended buses as a “woman who hangs into this juggernaut”.
He admitted that it “takes getting used to”, even by his own “fatty standards” – as reported, coalition politicians also accuse buses of embarrassing appearances (T ). However, Schneider described this as snobbery towards a newcomer to politics.
However, he is likely to have amazed the politicians in the coalition with his rosy view of the Berlin school system. Among other things, Schneider calculated that the 15,500 classes in the Berlin school system had an average of less than 25 students, and in the primary school area less than 22. That was far below the maximum legal requirements.
So there are basically enough school places in the system, said Schneider – regardless of the fact that, as reported (T ), 170 primary school students in Berlin still do not know which secondary school they will be allowed to attend in the coming school year.
