Because of the fierce criticism of the electoral law reform, the SPD has now come up with a compromise proposal. The SPD member of the Bundestag, Axel Schäfer, proposes lowering the five percent hurdle to four percent. This would partially compensate for the negative effects of the electoral reform on the left and on the CSU. Schäfer justifies his proposal in a two-page statement Süddeutsche Zeitung present.
Schäfer has won his constituency six times in a row and has been a member of the Bundestag since 2002. For seven years he was deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group. In his statement, Schäfer writes that the traffic light coalition has “achieved an important parliamentary success” with the electoral reform to reduce the size of the Bundestag. However, one point, the abolition of the basic mandate clause, “led to considerable criticism from all directions, which we must take seriously”. There is now “considerable potential for fake news and legends as well as avoidable disputes”. The traffic light coalition should “both resist this and tackle further reform of the electoral law and specifically discuss lowering the threshold clause to four percent”.
The basic mandate clause states that a party that fails the five percent hurdle can still enter the Bundestag according to its share of second votes if it has won at least three direct mandates. The left benefited from this clause in the last federal election, which is why it has 39 seats in parliament.
The clause was also a kind of life insurance for the CSU. In the last election, it only got 5.2 percent nationwide. Since the CSU always achieves far more than three direct mandates in Bavaria, it would have sat in the Bundestag even if it had slipped below the five percent mark. CSU boss Markus Söder had therefore accused the traffic light coalition in an SZ interview of wanting to “obviously put an end to the Left Party and massively damage the CSU” by abolishing the basic mandate clause.
The SPD deputy Schäfer now writes in his statement that since 1990 “the Greens, FDP and Left Party have failed in different legislative periods because of the five percent clause”. Now “a situation could arise in which the FDP, Left and CSU, together with 7 to 9 million voters, no longer send MPs to parliament”. This “would not be politically understandable for the majority of people and also not communicable by us”. Social Democrats “do not see the right to vote as an instrument of struggle against certain parties – in contrast to the Union, which in the 1960s wanted to destroy the FDP with the proposal for majority voting.”
The SPD must therefore now also take legal account of the “changed party landscape and take appropriate initiatives,” writes Schäfer. It is also worth taking a look at Europe: “Eight EU countries have thresholds of less than five percent, and in the European Parliament less than one percent is enough to win a seat.”
Traffic light coalition is considering changing list connections
The left-wing member of the Bundestag, Gregor Gysi, is also calling for the five percent hurdle to be adjusted. “If the traffic light coalition does not want to risk a constitutional dispute, it must lower the percentage hurdle to 3 or 3.5 percent,” Gysi told dem Mirror.
The traffic light coalition is already considering accommodating the CSU by allowing list connections. The CSU could then compete in such a connection with the CDU – and would no longer have a problem with the five percent hurdle. However, the two Union parties reject such a list connection. CSU boss Söder told the SZ that it was “outrageous that the majority in the Bundestag wants to decide how opposition parties organize themselves – that is encroaching and not compatible with our self-image”.