Electoral reform: recipe against bloating Bundestag wanted

“Organized election fraud”, “No-Go among Democrats”: Traffic light parties and the Union are arguing about reforming the electoral law. There is only agreement that the Bundestag should finally become smaller. But how?

With each election, the Bundestag has recently continued to grow. 598 members of parliament are the norm, in fact there are currently 736. Experts also believe that an even larger inflationary Bundestag is possible. To prevent this, domestic politicians in the traffic light coalition presented a draft for an electoral law reform on Monday.

Sharp criticism came immediately from the Union. CSU General Secretary Martin Huber spoke of “organized election fraud”. In doing so, the CSU misspoke in a way “that is a no-go among democrats,” countered the first parliamentary director of the FDP parliamentary group, Johannes Vogel. Why the dispute between traffic lights and Union is about and where both sides stand – the most important questions and answers.

Why does the Bundestag keep growing?

The Bundestag is made up of directly elected members of parliament who represent individual constituencies and members of parliament who enter parliament via party lists. The voters determine the former with their first vote, the latter with their second vote. The second votes are decisive for the composition. They determine which party has a share in a new Bundestag. That is what the federal election law says.

The results of first votes and second votes usually differ significantly from each other. In the last federal election, the FDP received 11.5 percent of all second votes, but did not win a single direct mandate. The CSU, in turn, won 45 of the 46 constituencies in Bavaria, but received 5.2 percent of all votes nationwide. That would have corresponded to only 34 mandates. She now has eleven so-called overhang mandates. In return, compensatory mandates ensure that the relationships between the parties are restored almost in line with their second vote result. In 2021, all parties except for the CSU received further mandates.

Advantage: Each vote counts almost equally. Disadvantage: The Bundestag is growing and becoming more expensive – and given the seven parties in the Bundestag, the trend is increasing.

What do the traffic light factions want to change?

The draft law by the SPD, Greens and FDP caps the number of mandates. The standard size of 598 MPs is no longer exceeded. In addition, no more overhang and compensation mandates will be awarded. Only the result of the second vote should be decisive for the number of seats of a party. These would get a new name: main voices. However, the main vote result would be converted again to the 16 federal states. If a party directly wins fewer constituencies in a state than it is entitled to, the remaining seats are allocated via the state list. However, if it wins more constituencies directly than it has seats based on the main vote result, the candidates with the lowest constituency vote result get nothing.

If this rule had already been applied in the 2021 federal election, eleven of the 45 directly elected CSU MPs would not have entered the Bundestag. There is also the risk that the respective constituency would then have no representative in the Bundestag. Some election winners without a good place on the list stayed outside. In the worst case, an entire region remains without political representation. That is why Linke boss Janine Wissler also criticized the traffic light plan.

SPD, Greens and FDP consider this scenario unlikely. The vast majority of constituencies already have two or more MPs.

So would the CSU be unilaterally disadvantaged?

Only if you only look at direct mandates and thus the overhang mandates. Because all parties would lose mandates if compensatory mandates were eliminated. In addition to the CSU, the CDU, SPD and AfD would also have had one or more overhang mandates removed from the 2021 election. And so far there is no current draft of the Union.

Your domestic politicians had recently spoken out in favor of a pure so-called trench electoral law. According to this, half of the seats would continue to be elected via the first vote, the remaining 299 solely via the second vote. There would be no compensation. Although the Bundestag shrank back to its normal size, the CDU, CSU and SPD in particular were being cheated.

Is an agreement even necessary?

SPD, Greens and FDP can push through an electoral law reform with their majority in the Bundestag. First, the parliamentary groups discuss the draft. It is hardly compatible with the proposals from the Union. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD), however, is pushing for an agreement. In this case, the Union would not go before the Federal Constitutional Court. Your faction leadership was now ready to talk.

What happens if the reform doesn’t come?

The renewed start of the traffic light is intended to prevent 19 of the previous 299 constituencies from having to be canceled in 2024. That would be the result of an electoral law reform decided by the grand coalition three years ago. Union and SPD had pushed this through against the will of the opposition. Twelve of the 16 federal states would then be affected by a deletion. This is how the constituency commission of the Bundestag calculated it. MPs from the CDU, CSU, SPD, AfD and Left Party currently represent these constituencies.

The previous electoral law reform in 2013 had been decided by the Union and SPD together with the opposition FDP and Greens. At the time, the discussion had taken several years and a second attempt.

(Source: dpa, AFP)