Frankfurt Mayor: Feldmann wants to vote out the majority immediately

After lengthy deliberations on Wednesday, the coalition factions Greens, SPD, FDP and Volt decided to vote Frankfurt's Lord Mayor Peter Feldmann (SPD) out of office this Thursday in the city council.

The CDU has also once again spoken out in favor of not postponing the motion for deselection, which is already on the agenda, to a later date.

The five factions together have the necessary two-thirds majority.

If the application is decided on Thursday, it will first depend on Feldmann himself.

The mayor then has one week to accept the deselection.

He has so far rejected this and said he would not accept voting out until mid-January.

If he sticks to this attitude, there will be a referendum on November 6th.

At least 30 percent of Frankfurt's eligible voters must then vote for him to be voted out.

The appointment is in the midst of the trials scheduled by the Frankfurt district court, in which the mayor has to answer on suspicion of accepting an advantage.

No request for retirement

The statement by the four coalition factions published on Wednesday evening states that the Frankfurt city parliament voted no confidence in the mayor on June 9 and asked him to resign.

“As announced, the coalition factions approve the motion to vote out announced for the meeting on July 14, 2022.”

Feldmann himself surprisingly initiated this discussion last week that there could be an alternative to the deselection this Thursday.

In a personal statement on Tuesday, he announced his resignation for next January.

On Friday he then specified that there could be two options for his resignation: a deselection procedure, as is now planned, which would then only be decided in January, and his application for "retirement for special reasons".

On Monday, Feldmann then said in a conversation with the four parliamentary group leaders of the Roman coalition – an initial conversation on Sunday had failed – that for him the only option was to be voted out in mid-January.

He didn't even want to apply for retirement.

Feldmann verbally assured the coalition on Monday that he would accept the deselection in writing within the specified period of one week after the decision by the city councilors in January.

Such a procedure would make the decision of the citizens, which would otherwise be necessary when voting out of office, to explicitly vote Feldmann out of office in a separate ballot, lapse.

That could have been an interesting offer for the coalition if Feldmann had presented it as the only solution from the start.

However, the factions on Monday and Tuesday were angry that the mayor was dictating the conditions for his deselection almost every day.

Or, as a city councilor from the Roman coalition put it: Feldmann kept everything moving so that no one could find their footing.

Doubts about Feldmann's statements

In addition, a lot of trust between the coalition and the SPD mayor has been lost in the past few days.

There is great uncertainty in Römer as to whether Feldmann's statement that he will definitely accept the city parliament's resolution in January and actually resign will stand up.

Isn't Feldmann speculating that the suspicion of corruption won't be substantiated and that he might be acquitted?

Would it still be possible to apply for a vote at all?

The FDP had decided on Monday.

"We have decided to vote out the mayor for lack of a better alternative," said group leader Yanki Pürsün.

For the CDU parliamentary group leader Nils Kößler there are "enough reasons to vote this mayor out of office" anyway.

The CDU is actually demanding Feldmann's immediate resignation.

Since he does not act on his own initiative, "deselection is the right solution," said Kößler.

Kößler does not think it is conceivable to postpone the deselection to a date in January, for which a special session of the city parliament would also have to be scheduled.

Then the city will "experience embarrassing trial days, during which the incumbent mayor sits in the dock in the courtroom".

Meanwhile, the police said that there were still unanswered questions in the investigation into the accident that became known on Tuesday, in which Feldmann is said to have touched a car while parking.

According to the police, Feldmann himself has not yet commented in more detail on the incident.

The reasons he gave were appointments that he had to keep.

The investigation deals with the suspicion of hit-and-run.