Late on Thursday evening, the Frankfurt city parliament opposed Frankfurt Mayor Peter Feldmann with an overwhelming majority and called on the SPD politician to resign.

If he does not “make his office available with immediate effect”, according to the resolution, the city councilors want to initiate the voting procedure against the Frankfurt mayor in the next plenary session on July 14th.

The reason for the application, it says, is the indictment by the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office against Feldmann approved by the district court last week and "his misconduct in recent weeks".

The Lord Mayor has to answer to the allegation of taking advantage in connection with the AWO scandal in court.

Mechthild Harting

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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In the evening, the Roman coalition consisting of the Greens, SPD, FDP and Volt as well as the parliamentary groups of the CDU, AfD and BFF-BIG voted for the “motion of no confidence”.

IBF's Jumas Medoff also supported the motion.

Around 80 percent of the city councillors, who met in the plenary hall in the Römer for the first time since the pandemic, voted for the "motion of no confidence".

As announced, the seven members of the Left Group, the Ökolinx-Elf group and the representative of the Garden Party voted against it.

The faction "Die Faction" abstained from voting.

In the evening, the leader of the left parliamentary group, Dominike Pauli, made it clear once again that the presumption of innocence applies to her parliamentary group until a court has found the mayor to be guilty.

Peter Feldmann offers talks

To the surprise of the Roman coalition, Feldmann had asked to speak right at the beginning of the debate, referring to the common political goals and renewed his offer to talk to the coalition.

He had been looking for a conversation in the past few days in order – as it is said – to negotiate a self-chosen exit.

In the plenary session he said: You can't blame him for everything.

At the same time, he announced that he was ready to "reconsider my role".

He referred to the DGB proposal for mediation: "That could be another building block."

Green party leader Dimitrios Bakakis Feldmann had previously agreed to "represent Frankfurt appropriately".

To strong applause from the city council, Bakakis had declared that Feldman could no longer remain head of this city.

Feldmann experiences the city as "abusive", as a man who publicly expresses himself in a way that despises women and degrades him, "who thinks he can simply take what he's not really entitled to".

Bakakis was surprised by Feldmann's offer, which was made public on Wednesday, that his door was always open and that he, the mayor, was willing to talk about alternatives to being voted out.

"We've had these talks," Bakakis said, "but we can't imagine what such an alternative might look like."

The SPD parliamentary group leader Ursula Busch found the clearest words for the unusual step of the city councilors in the debate.

She never dreamed of "standing here and asking the Social Democratic mayor to resign," she said.

Although the SPD has always shown solidarity with the mayor since autumn 2019, when the first allegations against Feldmann in connection with the AWO scandal became known, the relationship between Feldmann and the SPD parliamentary group has steadily deteriorated.

There was not the transparency and openness he had announced.

The team playing that the magistrate, administration and city council required in a municipal democracy "dwindled away".

The SPD, Busch continued,

I have exhausted every communication channel and every "internal escalation level" to convince the mayor to resign.

"Unfortunately, we have to admit: We didn't succeed." In the meantime, the only talk in the city is about Feldmann and the AWO scandal.

Everything else takes a back seat.

Appeal to Peter Feldmann: "Please do the right thing"

And then Busch turned directly to Feldmann, made eye contact and explicitly asked him to resign.

"Clear the way for the representation that Frankfurt deserves and for the policy on the ecological turnaround that our city urgently needs." And further.

"Please, do the right thing" and "save us all an ugly deselection campaign, even more political fatigue and the unnecessary expenditure of at least 1.5 million euros".

This sum is estimated for the deselection procedure.

Because the 63-year-old Feldmann, who was elected to office twice by the Frankfurters, must also be voted out by them again, with a majority of at least 30 percent of those entitled to vote.

Yannick Schwander, deputy head of the CDU parliamentary group, is convinced that the suspicion of corruption alone should have been enough for Feldmann to take action.

FDP faction leader Yanki Pürsün accused Feldmann of never having kept his own announcements.

"That's why we will deselect Peter Feldmann on July 14." Volt leader Martin Huber accused Feldmann of "loss of reality".

The people of Frankfurt had elected him twice, but not an “irreplaceable king of Frankfurt”.