Word: bundestag
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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French law gives the National Assembly the right to ask questions about the operations of the intelligence services, but the government's usual, and accepted, answer is a blank "secret de la défense. The West German Bundestag does have a watchdog committee for that nation's equivalent of the CIA. But the committee's eight members are sworn to deepest secrecy The Bundestag has declared members of the antinuclear Green Party ineligible to serve on the committee because they would not take the pledge...
...delegate slung a live cat around his neck. Two Bundestag Deputies played soccer in the aisles. From the podium, a man in a clown suit complained that the conference was interfering with Carnival, West Germany's annual spasm of pre-Lenten revelry. A delegate suggested that male candidates for the European Parliament in Strasbourg, whose nomination was the purpose of the meeting, should "undress and present themselves in the nude because the human body reveals political attitudes." Keynote Speaker Antje Vollmer railed against the "industrialized nature-destroying internationalism of neocolonialist nation states." Finally, the proceedings were disrupted...
...Pershing II missiles, retired two-star Bundeswehr General Gert Bastian quit the Greens last month, complaining of the creeping influence of the party's Marxist-Leninist faction and "a strong anti-American undertow." Elected last year as one of the party's 28 Green Deputies in the Bundestag, the gray-haired and soft-spoken 60-year-old was one of the few Greens with appeal to middle-class citizens seeking an alternative to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), West Germany's mainstream left-leaning party. Said Bastian of the internal feuding that encouraged him to resign...
...distinctive feature of the Greens move into the Bundestag was their original resolve to rotate their Parliamentary seats among themselves every two years. "The theory was that politicking should not be a profession. We didn't want to estrange our delegates from their regular lives," said vonGleich. But recently even this policy has become a source of contention. "In practice, however, we're finding the mood is increasingly one of competition," von Gleich added...
...sent back to party headquarters where they would probably be more useful. By resigning his position within the party but not his seat in Parliament. Bastian avoids the possibility of being asked to step down prematurely. But his departure also decreases the membership of the Green delegation (to the Bundestag) to only 27 legislators, precariously close to the minimum for an active delegation; if only two more delegates leave the party, it will lose many of its parliamentary privileges--including the federal subsidy--its vote on the various committees, and the power to introduce legislation...