Axel Schmidt speaks of pure relief. He didn’t have to go to Berlin, to this Moloch, where the second largest parliament in the world has recently been meeting. Schmidt had run as a direct candidate for the FDP in the federal election in September, which was a hopeless undertaking, and Oberhachinger was so badly placed on the state list of liberals that it was not enough for the mega-Bundestag with its 736 parliamentarians . And so Schmidt can state with satisfaction: “I am glad that the Bundestag is not even bigger and that I therefore do not belong to it.” The loser is celebrating.
Now Schmidt, together with numerous colleagues from his party, has made it his business to destroy Germany’s top position in the world. “Germany is in second place and has overtaken Indonesia and North Korea,” he notes – in other words, in terms of the number of MPs. There are 692 in the Consultative People’s Chamber in Indonesia, 687 in the Supreme People’s Assembly in Kim Jong-us Reich – only China, with 2980 elected representatives in its puppet parliament, hovers in unattainable spheres. Not even the CSU can jeopardize the record with its overhang mandates.
And that’s exactly what Schmidt’s group wants to eliminate with a motion that found a majority at the party convention of the Bavarian FDP at the weekend. Specifically, the Bavarian Liberals are calling for the Bundestag to have a standard size with 600 seats and a maximum of 220 constituencies, in which, in case of doubt, direct mandates are awarded by a runoff election. Even that would not have helped Axel Schmidt in the federal election. But he didn’t want to go to parliament anyway.