The Bundestag oversees the intelligence services through a small body, the Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium, the parliamentary oversight panel. The law that governs it says: Die Beratungen des Parlamentarischen Kontrollgremiums sind geheim. “The deliberations of the parliamentary oversight panel are secret.” Its members must keep secret what they learn there, and the duty continues after they leave the panel.
politics
Knowledge Is Power, Power Is Knowledge
Wissen ist Macht, knowledge is power, goes back to Francis Bacon, who wrote in Latin in 1597: Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. In Germany the phrase belongs to the labor movement. On 5 February 1872, Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, gave a lecture to the Dresden workers’ education association. Its title was Wissen ist Macht – Macht ist Wissen. In it he said: Das Wissen ist für die Herrschenden, die Unwissenheit für die Beherrschten. “Knowledge is for the rulers, ignorance for the ruled.” He called this the innermost nature of rule.
Liebknecht did not praise this order. He demanded that workers win political power and remove the barriers that kept them from knowledge.
Four Weeks Ahead
Members of the Bundestag can commission studies from the parliament’s research service, the Wissenschaftliche Dienste. The study then belongs to the member or committee that ordered it, as a rule exclusively for four weeks. Only afterward does the Bundestag publish it on its website, a practice it began in 2016. Before that, they were not routinely published. In June 2015 the Federal Administrative Court ruled that they must be released on request. One of the cases concerned papers that Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had used in his doctoral thesis.
The Reading Room
From 1 February 2016, members of the Bundestag could read the confidential negotiating texts of the TTIP trade agreement between the EU and the United States in a reading room in the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs. The Green parliamentary group described the conditions in a parliamentary question. Members were not allowed even to discuss what they had read with their own staff or with experts. Staff of the parliamentary groups were not admitted.
From Fetch to Bring
In 2024 the federal family minister, Lisa Paus, defended her plan for a basic child allowance, the Kindergrundsicherung. The benefits were meant to reach families they had not reached before. She said the aim was to move von der Holschuld der Bürger zur Bringschuld des Staates, from the citizen’s duty to fetch to the state’s duty to bring. The plan failed within the governing coalition because of resistance from the FDP.
Kuka
In 2016 the Chinese appliance maker Midea offered 115 euros per share, about 4.6 billion euros in total, for Kuka, the robot maker from Augsburg. The federal government tried in vain to prevent the takeover. It did not want future technology to move from Germany to China. Critics feared that Midea could pull patents, data and other know-how out of Kuka. Midea’s stake rose to more than 90 percent. In November 2021 Midea demanded a squeeze-out of the remaining shareholders, and Kuka left the stock exchange.
The First Veto
In August 2018 the federal cabinet for the first time voted to block a foreign takeover. The Chinese company Yantai Taihai wanted to buy Leifeld Metal Spinning, a machine-tool maker in Westphalia. The buyer withdrew shortly before the expected ban. Leifeld’s products are used in aerospace and can also be used in the nuclear industry. The government then planned to lower the threshold at which it may review a foreign purchase of a German company from 25 to 15 percent.
Ship Engines and a University
In April 2024 federal prosecutors had three Germans arrested in Bad Homburg and Düsseldorf. They were suspected of working for a Chinese intelligence service and of obtaining information on militarily usable technology. A couple among them had set up a research cooperation with a German university, which began with a study on parts for powerful ship engines. In December 2025 the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf sentenced the main defendant to three years in prison and the couple to two years each on probation. The conviction was for violating EU export rules on goods that can serve both civilian and military purposes. The espionage charge was dropped. As of December 2025, the verdict was not final.
Explaining a Vote
Under § 31 of the Bundestag’s rules of procedure, every member may explain a final vote. The explanation can be oral, for no more than five minutes, or a short written statement. In the 2017–2021 term, members made 2,073 such statements. Only 11 of them were oral. On 19 August 2015 the Bundestag voted on the third aid package for Greece. Sixty-three members of the CDU/CSU group voted no. One of them, Wolfgang Bosbach, said: Auch durch Druck und Drohungen wird sich mein Abstimmungsverhalten nicht ändern. Pressure and threats will not change how I vote.
Settled in Cabinet
Article 65 of the Basic Law: Über Meinungsverschiedenheiten zwischen den Bundesministern entscheidet die Bundesregierung. The federal government decides disagreements between federal ministers. Under its rules of procedure, the cabinet decides by majority. On 27 November 2017 Germany voted in Brussels for renewing the approval of the weedkiller glyphosate, on the decision of the agriculture minister, Christian Schmidt. The environment minister, Barbara Hendricks, opposed it. Under the government’s rules of procedure, Germany should have abstained. Chancellor Angela Merkel said the vote did not match the instructions the federal government had worked out.