Under normal circumstances, the Berlin Constitutional Court and the German Bundestag have little to do with each other. This Thursday, however, the statements of Berlin’s highest judge whirled up the agenda of some parliamentarians. had the day before Court President Ludgera Selting announced that the judges will probably invalidate the sometimes chaotic election to the Berlin House of Representatives last September. “We will deal with yesterday’s bang,” says the SPD chairman in the election examination committee, Johannes Fechner. “We still need advice at the traffic light.”
That comes as a surprise. Although there was also a vote on the Bundestag on the breakdown election day, the incidents have since been examined in two independent procedures. This also makes sense because the constituencies are tailored differently and some irregularities only affect one of the elections. Among other things, the Berlin court complained that blank ballot papers had been copied and then used. However, this apparently only happened with ballot papers for the election of the House of Representatives.
But the reasoning of the Berlin judges is so fundamental that the election examination committee also wants to examine it. The item “Recommendation for the objection of the Federal Returning Officer” planned for this day in the committee was removed from the agenda. Some of the criticism from Berlin’s constitutional judges may well be relevant to the federal elections in Berlin. The judges see the preparation of the vote as so inadequate that they rate it as an electoral error. “Failure had to be almost logical,” says Daniela Ludwig, chairwoman of the CSU committee. “After the thunder, I can’t imagine that you only want to intervene minimally invasively here.”
While the Federal Returning Officer insists that the Bundestag elections be repeated in half of the Berlin constituencies, the representatives of the traffic light coalition have apparently wanted a smaller solution so far. According to a confidential draft by the committee, which became public in August, only 20 percent of the polling stations should be re-voted. It remains to be seen whether this requirement can still be met following the Berlin court’s scolding. The parliamentarians want to pass a new resolution in the course of October, which the Bundestag should then vote on in November at the latest.
The next election should go smoothly, the parties are already warming up
In Berlin, it seems that the “preliminary legal opinion” of the highest court has been accepted quite definitively. The statements are a “clear announcement,” said future state returning officer Stephan Bröchler on the broadcaster RBB. The chance that they would be revised is “relatively small”. The new office for the administrative scientist is just one of the building blocks with which the Senate is currently completely redesigning the electoral organization. The next election should go smoothly.
The Berlin parties are already warming up. Stefan Evers, General Secretary of the Berlin CDU, describes Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) as “a ruler on call”. The FDP – like the CDU in the opposition – also considers a complete re-election to be “logical”, says its state chairman Christoph Meyer.
Criticism comes from the coalition parties of the SPD. The Greens and the Left are primarily targeting the then Senator for the Interior, Andreas Geisel, in whose office the state election commission is located. The social democrat is now a building senator. Asked about his responsibility for the election disaster, he asked on Wednesday at a discussion of the Berlin morning post back: “What would make it better if I resigned?”