Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028

The Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028 is the dispute over the government of the Kingdom of Prussia that began in April 2028, when the Regency Council acting for the minor King, Alexander I, dismissed the Minister-President, Dr Johanna Falk, although her ministry held a comfortable majority in the Abgeordnetenhaus. It is unresolved.

In the six months that followed, a restricted caretaker administered the kingdom under an appointment the lower house never confirmed, Falk’s coalition held together while her challenge was before the Prussian Constitutional Court, and the 2029 budget approached with nobody able to introduce it. In the first fortnight of October the crisis turned three times. On 3 October the Zentrum left the coalition, and Falk’s majority was gone. On 9 October the Court held her dismissal void and restored her ministry, to a House she could no longer command. And on 10 October a House in which no party could govern found the one thing two thirds of it could agree on: the Prussian Landtag and the imperial Reichstag and Bundesrat each abolished the Regency Council and made Princess Charlotte sole Regent, and the twenty-seven states of the Empire ratified the imperial amendment within a day.

Charlotte was sworn on 11 October and, on Falk’s advice, dissolved the House for an election on 3 December 2028. No one commands the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus, but the question of who exercises the Crown, which the Council’s conduct had made the centre of the crisis, has been answered by the two parliaments.

Background

Prussia is governed under its Constitution of 1850, amended many times and never replaced. It joins a strong Crown to parliamentary government through the rule of dual confidence: the Minister-President must hold the confidence of both the King and the Abgeordnetenhaus, and either may withdraw it. The King keeps personal powers that need no minister’s countersignature, among them the nomination and dismissal of the Minister-President and an absolute veto over Prussian legislation.

When Heinrich I died suddenly on 12 February 2028, his son Alexander was fourteen. His Prussian and imperial powers passed to a nine-member Regency Council chaired by his elder sister, Princess Charlotte. The exercise of a personal Prussian royal power requires two thirds of the Council, which is six votes.

Falk had become Minister-President after the election of 2027, at the head of a coalition of the SPD, the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei and the Zentrum, with a comfortable majority. She was Heinrich’s appointment, and he had warned her privately against the measure that would end her ministry and had done nothing to obstruct her.

The dismissal

In April 2028 Falk’s ministry issued the Advice-Binding Declaration, which stated that royal discretion in Prussia was, by settled convention, ordinarily bound by ministerial advice even where the written Constitution preserved a formal choice. Her government regarded it as a statement of how responsible government had come to work. The Council regarded it as an attempt to amend the Constitution by declaration.

The Council dismissed her by six votes to three, exactly the two thirds required. Princess Charlotte, Queen Mother Caroline and the President of the Abgeordnetenhaus voted against; the two presiding officers of the Reichstag, the two of the Bundesrat and the two retired judges voted for. Alexander, who attends without a vote, opposed the dismissal privately and asked that his dissent be minuted, and the leak of that minute made the Council’s position harder than any of its members had expected: a regency claiming to protect the Crown’s discretion had used it against the preference of the King it acted for.

The caretaker

The Council appointed Konrad von Arnim, an elder of the Freikonservative Partei, to administer the kingdom. He did not seek confirmation from the Abgeordnetenhaus, which would not have given it, and the Constitutional Court, accepting Falk’s challenge, confined him to essential administration: he could keep services running and meet existing obligations, but he could not carry a legislative programme, make irreversible appointments or introduce the estimates for 2029.

The House continued to sit with Falk’s majority intact. It passed a resolution of confidence in her ministry that had no legal effect, opened an inquiry into alleged coordination between members of the Council and the conservative parties before the dismissal, and let the provincial bills already in committee wait on the order paper. Supply was the approaching test: the 2028 budget had been enacted before the dismissal, and the 2029 estimates could be introduced by nobody.

The collapse of the majority

The coalition held for six months on a single proposition, that the Court would decide and that until it did the three parties would stand together. The Zentrum had never been comfortable with the proposition. It is the Catholic party of the Rhineland, Westphalia and Upper Silesia, federalist and institutional by temper, and its members had supported the Declaration as a statement of practice without wishing to fight the Crown over it during a King’s minority.

On Tuesday 3 October 2028, as the Court’s judgment was expected, the Zentrum’s Prussian organisation voted to leave the coalition. Its statement said that the party would accept whatever the Court decided but would not resume a contest with the Crown during the regency, whoever the Court held to be Minister-President, and that it would support no ministry whose first business was that contest. The SPD and the FVP together fall short of the 241 votes that are an absolute majority of the House. From that afternoon no combination of parties in the Abgeordnetenhaus could confirm a Minister-President, because the Zentrum would not return to Falk and would not join the conservatives against her.

The Zentrum’s withdrawal did not touch the imperial coalition, of which it is also a part. The separation of the Prussian and imperial governments in 1919 is the reason that it could not, and Chancellor Dr Matthias Brenner declined to comment on what he described as a matter for the Prussian parties.

The judgment

On Monday 9 October the Prussian Constitutional Court gave judgment. It held that the dismissal was void. The Crown’s power to withdraw confidence from a Minister-President who retains the confidence of the House is, in the Court’s words, a safeguard against the breakdown of lawful government, and a dispute between a ministry and the Crown about the extent of the Crown’s discretion is not such a breakdown, however serious the dispute. The Council had therefore no power to dismiss Falk for issuing the Declaration.

The Court also held that the Advice-Binding Declaration was of no legal force. A convention may bind in practice; it cannot be made binding in law by a ministry’s declaration that it exists, and the Crown’s discretion is exactly what the written Constitution says it is until the Constitution is amended. The Declaration was a statement of the ministry’s view, which the ministry was entitled to make, and nothing more.

Both sides claimed the judgment, and both were partly right. Falk was restored, and von Arnim’s appointment lapsed, his acts in the interval standing. But she was restored to a House in which she no longer had a majority, and the restoration came six days after the event that made it empty.

The regency amendments

The judgment answered the question the dismissal had raised and left the Council in being, with its six-to-three majority intact and a restored Minister-President who could no longer command the House. The parties drew the conclusion within a day. The Council’s conduct, and not any single ministry, had become the obstacle, and every party except the Deutschkonservative Partei had come to the same view by different roads: the SPD and the FVP because the Council had dismissed their ministry, the Zentrum because it wanted no further contest between parliament and Crown during a minority, and the National Liberals and the Free Conservatives because a Council whose majority had lost in the Court could not govern with authority.

On Tuesday 10 October both parliaments amended their Constitutions. In Prussia, the Abgeordnetenhaus, in which no combination of parties could confirm a Minister-President, passed the regency amendment by more than the two thirds required, with the Deutschkonservative Partei voting against, and the Herrenhaus passed it the same evening. A Prussian constitutional amendment requires no royal assent, and the amendment was in force on promulgation. In the Empire, the Reichstag and the Bundesrat each passed the imperial amendment by more than the three fifths required, Prussia’s Bundesrat votes cast on the instructions of the restored Falk ministry. Imperial assent is not part of the imperial amendment procedure. The amendment then required ratification by the constituent states, and all twenty-seven ratified within a day, several of their parliaments sitting through the night, which no amendment had done before.

The two amendments, drafted together and passed separately, abolish the Regency Council and provide that Princess Charlotte, as the King’s elder sister and nearest adult of the blood, exercises his powers as sole Regent until he is sixteen, and advises and supervises him, as the Council would have done, until he is eighteen. They preserve the rule that the two capacities are never merged: Charlotte is Regent of Prussia under the Prussian amendment and Regent of the Empire under the imperial one, and acts in each separately. Neither amendment touches the succession. Charlotte had not sought the office and had said nothing in public while the amendments were drafted. It was reported, and has been neither confirmed nor denied, that the papal nuncio in Berlin had told the Zentrum’s leaders privately that the Holy See had no view, which they took as leave to vote for the amendments.

The Princess Regent

Charlotte took two oaths on Wednesday 11 October, the Prussian before the presidents of the two chambers of the Landtag and the imperial before the presidents of the Reichstag and the Bundesrat. She accepted the office reluctantly, on the condition, which she stated in a short statement and which the parties accepted, that the members of the abolished Council remain available to advise her, and she said that she would keep her shifts on the ward on the days she could.

Her first act as Regent of Prussia was the one the crisis required. On the advice of the Minister-President, she dissolved the Abgeordnetenhaus, and an election is called for Sunday 3 December 2028. Falk leads a caretaker ministry into it under the restrictions that bound her predecessor. The Herrenhaus, which is never dissolved, continues to sit.

Open questions

The crisis now holds three unresolved questions, and the Register states them without answering them.

What the regency becomes. Charlotte holds the Crown’s personal powers alone, including the power to dismiss a Minister-President that the Court has now confined, and she will hold them until 18 January 2030. Whether a single Regent who voted against the dismissal exercises them differently from the Council that made it is untested.

Whether anyone can command the next House. The Zentrum’s position, to support no ministry whose first business is a contest with the Crown, will be tested in December, and the parties of the right have not shown that they can command a majority either.

How the kingdom is paid for. The 2029 estimates cannot be introduced by a caretaker. The new House will meet in December, and unless a ministry can be confirmed and a budget passed before the year ends, Prussia will enter 1 January 2029 under the continuing-supply provisions of its Constitution, which have never been used for a whole financial year.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Kingdom of Prussia: the kingdom, its Constitution and its Landtag
• Alexander I: the minor King in whose name the Council acts
• Princess Charlotte: who chaired the Regency Council, voted against the dismissal, and became sole Regent
• The German Empire: the Empire whose government the crisis has not touched

Categories

World History · The German Empire · The Kingdom of Prussia · Constitutional crises