AND
Martin Hagen, Chairman of the FDP Bavaria
Markus Söder has announced that he will stop all open fine proceedings in connection with Corona regulations. “We want peace now,” said the Prime Minister. A late admission that he has completely overstepped his bounds during the pandemic?
We remember: Citizens were no longer allowed to leave their homes at night, and during the day only with a valid reason. They were allowed to travel a maximum of 15 kilometers from their home. Social contacts outside of their own household were prohibited. Children and young people were not only banned from attending school, but also from all kinds of sports and leisure activities for months.
Fines were imposed for violations of the sometimes absurd rules – in spring 2020, for example, for citizens who read a book alone on a park bench. In 2021, five Allgäu schoolchildren each had to pay over 200 euros for playing table tennis outside. Violations of the mask requirement were even more expensive – even where experts believed it was completely pointless.
Some fines have already had to be repaid after the Federal Administrative Court declared the rigid exit restrictions from the first Bavarian Infection Protection Measures Ordinance to be disproportionate at the end of 2022. However, this only affected the period up to April 2020.
Following Markus Söder’s announcement that he would close all open cases (that’s a good 17,000), the question of equal treatment now arises: What about the approximately 240,000 cases in which the fines have already been paid? Are those who paid without hesitation now the fools?
The state government should pull itself together and refund these people their money. That would also be a signal to the population that the CSU and Free Voters have learned from their mistakes during the Corona period.
NO
Toni Schuberl, legal policy spokesman for the Green Party in the state parliament
It’s annoying when Markus Söder thinks he can first decide on rules for his own personal headline and then abolish them again, as he likes. We have a constitutional state and not an ego show. The Prime Minister’s planned measure is an affront to all those who have behaved in accordance with the law and complied with the Corona rules.
We Greens have been calling for an evaluation of the measures imposed since the Corona pandemic. We need an objective and comprehensive review in order to learn from it for the future. Söder strictly rejects this. He doesn’t even want to know what went right and what went wrong. He talks about making peace as if it had been a war. This choice of words is completely wrong. Our position is more nuanced. Fines based on regulations that courts have classified as unlawful must be paid back in full. We have been fighting for this for a long time.
The most blatant example is the curfew, the extent of which we also criticized. A court ruled it unconstitutional. People were even thrown in prison for violating the curfew. That was completely excessive. Söder should apologize to these people personally.
Fines for lawful measures, on the other hand, cannot simply be abolished. We must question and discuss the sense in them. Even a rule that seems absurd in retrospect may have made sense at the time it was issued. And then it must be complied with. A violation leads to a fine, and you have to be able to rely on that.
A government that arbitrarily says one thing today and another tomorrow does no one any good. The CSU and Free Voters decided on the Corona rules. It would be good if they showed backbone and stood by them.
