There are currently 205 MPs in the Bavarian state parliament, too many according to the FDP. And there could be more. According to forecasts by the state returning officer, the next parliament could even have 220 representatives. The FDP and their fellow campaigners want to prevent this and are therefore starting a referendum.
“A larger parliament isn’t better, it’s just more expensive,” said state and faction leader Martin Hagen on Tuesday in the Munich press club. The population had no understanding for that. A member of parliament costs the taxpayer 1.5 million euros per legislative period, says Hagen, and that’s without a pension. If the calculation is correct, there would be additional costs of 60 million euros per legislative period if the state parliament continued to grow.
The Federation of Taxpayers and the Federation of the Self-Employed support the referendum, but the FDP is quite alone in the state parliament. Corresponding motions by the Liberals to reform the electoral law were repeatedly rejected there. The referendum is being taken “very seriously,” says Tobias Reiß, parliamentary director of the CSU in the state parliament. However, anyone who takes a look at the situation will find “that Bavaria, with its constantly growing population, does not have an oversized state parliament”. Similar to Reiß, Jürgen Mistol (Greens) emphasizes “what is special” about Bavarian electoral law, according to which all regions of the state are “extremely well represented in the state parliament and are heard there”. A smaller state parliament means “clearly less proximity” between politics and the population.
There is no willingness to limit oneself, Hagen comments on the attitude of the other parties, and parliamentary group leader Alexander Muthmann, who is responsible for the referendum at the FDP, speaks of the “complete unwillingness of the established parties to reform”. He sees the referendum as a “wake-up call” from the population, which should be followed by a greater reduction in bureaucracy. More officials, more regulations, Muthmann wants to change all of that.
The initiators of the referendum need at least 25,000 signatures
CSU man Reiß, on the other hand, speaks of a “campaign”. The FDP must “let itself be asked: Is it worth simply trying to win votes to damage the legitimacy of the state parliament and its MPs?” Reiß believes that the fact that the FDP “criticizes the number of direct mandates of all things” is revealing. “Anyone who hasn’t been able to win direct mandates and convince the local people so far makes such a proposal.” Even Andreas Winhart from the AfD describes the FDP initiative as “immature and generally populist”. At the same time, however, he refers to his party’s election programs, which aim to “reduce the size of parliaments”. Fabian Mehring (Free Voters) also speaks of the “populist election campaign hit”, the Green Mistol calls it “populist propaganda at the expense of parliamentarism”. When it comes to electoral law, he sees a different need for reform, such as lowering the voting age to 16.
Before there is actually a referendum, the initiators need at least 25,000 signatures. If these come together, the Ministry of the Interior must check whether a referendum is permissible. The initiators then no longer have the schedule in hand, the only thing that is clear is that a possible electoral law reform will no longer affect the next parliament. A new state parliament will be elected in autumn 2023, the exact date has not yet been set, it would be “obvious”, says Hagen, for a referendum to take place with the election.
The constitution currently provides for 180 MPs, with the fact that there are 25 more women and men in parliament due to equalization and overhang mandates in the complicated Bavarian electoral system. This is based on two pillars: On the one hand, there are 91 constituencies in which one representative is directly elected. In it is who gets the majority of the votes and whose party makes it over the five percent hurdle nationwide. The other 89 MPs are elected from lists drawn up by the parties for each governorate.
A referendum has already led to the downsizing
But that’s not all: it can happen that a party wins more direct mandates in a government district, which corresponds to a constituency, than it is entitled to based on the total votes. For a long time, the CSU won all direct mandates (the Greens also won six in the 2018 election) and thus already had half of the seats in the constituencies, even if the total number of votes was less than 50 percent. However, because the directly elected members of parliament are the local representatives of the people, this overhang of mandates remains. In the current state parliament, for example, the CSU has ten overhang mandates. In order to nevertheless implement the overall result in the allocation of seats, the other parties then receive additional seats for their list candidates. In short: It is filled up until everything fits again.
With a wink, FW politician Mehring points out that the people in Bavaria themselves could contribute to “reducing the size of parliament: the fewer direct mandates the CSU wins, the fewer equalizing mandates inflate the plenary hall.” According to Mehring, the state parliament is rather too small than too big. Measured against the number of inhabitants, which has increased over the decades, the number of deputies per inhabitant has “even decreased massively”. For Simone Strohmayr (SPD), Bavaria has “particularly few MPs per inhabitant” compared to other state parliaments. Like Mehring, Strohmayr says that the population has grown, but the state parliament has not. “Citizen-oriented politics means that the constituencies don’t get too big.”
Bavaria’s state parliament has already been reduced in size, also by referendum. Since 1998 it has been stipulated that there are 180 members of Parliament, not 204. The FDP is aiming for a target size of 160. If their referendum were also successful, there would then be a change in the state election law. In order to ensure that fewer MPs are elected, the number of constituencies would have to be reduced from the current 91 to around 80.