Shanghai Fugu Agreement

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Shanghai Fugu Agreement

The Shanghai Fugu Agreement (German: Shanghaier Kugelfisch-Abkommen) was a successful 1985 political prank played on the Social Democrats in the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
state of Hesse

Hesse

Hesse is a States of Germany of Germany with an area of 21,110 km? and just over six million inhabitants. The state capital is Wiesbaden. Hesse's largest city is nearby Frankfurt am Main....
.

In 1985 the new Green Party prepared to enter into a German state government

States of Germany

Germany is a federation consisting of sixteen states, known in German language as L?nder . Since Land is the literal German word for "country", the term Bundesl?nder is commonly used colloquially, as it is more specific, though technically incorrect within the corpus of German law....
for the first time in its history.

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Encyclopedia

The Shanghai Fugu Agreement (German: Shanghaier Kugelfisch-Abkommen) was a successful 1985 political prank played on the Social Democrats in the German

Germany

Hesse

States of Germany

Joschka Fischer

Joseph Martin "Joschka" Fischer was Germany Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice Chancellor of Germany in the government of Gerhard Schr?der from 1998 to 2005....
who later became minister of Foreign Affairs in the German Federal Government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder

Gerhard Schröder

is a Germany politics, and was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany , he led a coalition government of the SPD and the Alliance 90/The Greens....
. The 1985 Hesse coalition under Prime Minister Holger Börner

Holger Börner

Holger B?rner was a Germany politician of the SPD. He was Minister-President of Hesse from 1976 until 1987. As such he served as President of the German Bundesrat of the Bundesrat of Germany in 1986/87, but only served until the Landtag elections of 24 April 1987...
was to be based on an official policy agreement negotiated by both parties.

During a final night session of the negotiations the Greens tabled a demand that Hesse join the "Shanghai Fugu Agreement". This was accepted by their tired Social Democratic counterparts and became official state policy.

The Greens argued that the fugu

Fugu

is the Japanese word for pufferfish and is also a Japanese dish prepared from the meat of pufferfish or porcupinefish of the genus Diodon. Because pufferfish is lethally poisonous if prepared incorrectly, fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine....
fish is well known to be a dangerous delicacy requiring specialized chef

Chef

A chef is a person who cooking professionally. In a professional kitchen setting, the term is used only for the one person in charge of everyone else in the kitchen, the executive chef....
s who mostly come from Asia. Due to expanding restrictions on work permits restaurants have found it difficult to employ such specialists. The "Shanghai Fugu Agreement" provides special regulations for certified fugu chefs internationally.

(It should be noted that chefs in Japan require certification to handle the fish.)

The agreement was absolutely fictional but was neither discovered to be a joke by the Social Democrats during the nightly negotiations nor later by civil servants or the press who went through the coalition contracts. It took years before the Agreement was revealed to be a joke.

Sources

de: (Newsletter, Green parliamentary group in the Hesse parliament, Fraktionsgrün Nr. 1, May 2004, p. 4)
de: (mentioning the Fugu Agreement ("Kugelfischabkommen") in § 6)
de