Order, order!

GERMANY’S parliament, the Bundestag, has produced some memorable moments over the years. Whether they qualify as oratory is less clear. In 1984 a young Joschka Fischer (nobody dreamt of a Green foreign minister just 14 years later) yelled: “With your permission, Mr President, you are an arsehole!” Herbert Wehner, a leading member in the 1960s and 70s, told one opponent to “go wash yourself first” and another that “you are a pig, do you know that?”

Those members attempting wit—and there are some—face a more humdrum reality. Often they address a chamber that is mostly empty. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her ministers, if present at all, sit diagonally behind the orators, so that they can ignore them and catch up on some reading. This may explain why many of Berlin’s political wonks go online for their thrills, watching prime minister’s questions in Britain’s House of Commons. How else to have fun?

Certainly not during the two Bundestag slots allotted to “question time”. One, on the first Wednesday of a parliamentary session, is billed as an interrogation of the government. But the government chooses the topic, the opposition must submit questions in writing the preceding Friday and ministers usually dispatch minions to read out replies. The second, also on Wednesdays, is meant to be more spontaneous but in practice turns out much the same.

In April Norbert Lammert, the Bundestag’s president, called these question periods the “weakest part of German parliamentary democracy” and “politically meaningless”. Last month he went from cranky to irate when, on one occasion, not a single cabinet member turned up. Another no-show, he let it be known, and he would call the charade off.

The opposition, which has just one-fifth of the seats against the grand coalition’s four-fifths, wants to change the format to make it more like Westminster, with direct questioning of the chancellor and her ministers. Unthinkable, for that would make politics a “show”, counters Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the largest party. (Mr Lammert is also a Christian Democrat, but the Bundestag is his focus of loyalty.) So here is a modest proposal: if witty repartee is out of the question, why not take a leaf out of the Ukrainian or Italian parliament’s book and go straight to the fisticuffs?