The German parliament failed to complete one of its more important constitutional tasks on Friday: The planned vote on three vacant positions of the panel of judges in the Constitutional Court was removed from the agenda at short notice. The reason: It became apparent that at least one of the candidates, jurist and professor Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, might not receive enough votes.

Since the governing parties, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), do not command a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, they are dependent on support from the opposition for votes affecting the court.

This was not supposed to have been a problem, as the opposition Greens and the Left Party had signaled that they would vote for the SPD-nominated Brosius-Gersdorf. But then it became clear that some CDU members would not — especially because of her liberal stance on abortion.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the second biggest faction in the parliament, had already made clear they were vehemently opposed to her nomination — unsurprisingly, as she had also suggested she would........

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