News blog on the Berlin election: Explorations begin: CDU meets SPD and Greens

Five days after the repeat elections to the Berlin House of Representatives, exploratory talks on forming a government will begin on Friday. The winner of the election, the CDU, first invited the SPD (10:00 a.m.) and then the Greens (2:30 p.m.). In the talks, those involved want to find out whether they see a sufficient basis for starting coalition negotiations. You will be guided in a manageable circle. The parties involved are expected to send six or seven representatives each.

The Berlin House of Representatives is expected to have a female president for the first time in around 30 years. The CDU parliamentary group in the newly elected parliament nominated its MP Cornelia Seibeld for the post on Thursday, a spokesman said. The 48-year-old was previously Vice President of the House of Representatives. She is to replace the previous President Dennis Buchner of the SPD.

The new House of Representatives is expected to meet for the first time on March 16, when Seibeld is to be elected. Usually, the Presidents of the House of Representatives are elected by a large majority. The right to propose always lies with the strongest faction, which is the CDU after the repeat election.

The current recounts of the election results from last Sunday are causing discussions in Berlin. “We check, check, check with the aim of finding errors so that they are all corrected in the final report,” said state returning officer Stephan Bröchler on Thursday. Individual results of recounts are only water level reports until the official final result is determined.

It was only on Wednesday that a subsequent count of previously unconsidered votes in constituency 3 in Lichtenberg resulted in the same number of votes for the CDU direct candidate and his competitor from the left, after the CDU candidate had been ahead until then. According to an rbb report on Thursday, a recount of further votes from a single polling station showed that the CDU is now just ahead again.

Lichtenberg’s district returning officer, Axel Hunger, confirmed on request that there had been a corresponding recount on Thursday morning, but not the result. In the event of a stalemate, the lot should have decided which of the two candidates would go straight into the House of Representatives.

State Returning Officer Bröchler sees nothing unusual in the recount: “These are the normal correction processes that take place,” he said. “And that also shows that they do a good job of checking that they actually look at all the transcripts again,” says Bröchler. “They work extremely carefully. But because they work carefully, mistakes also become apparent.”

Like the old one, the new CDU parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives will be led by Kai Wegner. According to a spokesman, 50 of the 51 MPs present voted for the 50-year-old at a parliamentary group meeting on Thursday. Wegner has been CDU chairman in Berlin since 2019 and parliamentary group leader since 2021.

Like the old one, the new SPD faction in the Berlin House of Representatives will be led by Raed Saleh. At the parliamentary group meeting on Thursday, the 45-year-old was unanimously elected to office, according to a spokesman.

Saleh has been SPD faction leader since 2011. Since 2020, he has also served as SPD party chairman together with the Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey. The SPD faction in the House of Representatives has 34 members, two fewer than the old one.

According to his own words, CDU top candidate and election winner Kai Wegner is “open” to the exploratory talks with the SPD and the Greens on Friday. “Our clear goal is to form a stable Berlin coalition that works together in a spirit of trust and together ensures that Berlin works again,” he said on Thursday.

“Berlin needs a government that will bring the city back together,” said Wegner. “We have to win back people’s trust in politics.” The Berliners gave this order to the CDU, and he takes it very seriously.

Wegner wants to forge a two-party coalition of his party with the SPD or the Greens and move into the town hall as governing mayor. Whether this will succeed is an open question. Because the previous alliance of SPD, Greens and Left would also have a majority in the new House of Representatives. The exploratory talks on forming a government, which are not yet coalition negotiations, will begin on Friday.

There are currently a number of options on the table for forming a government: black-red, black-green or the continuation of red-green-red. But only one of the station wagons works for the Green Youth – and that is the continuation of the still existing red-green-red government coalition.

The Jusos also find similar words. “For us, a CDU that is becoming more and more right-wing, that uses racist narratives, is not a party with which we want to enter into a coalition,” said Deputy State Chairwoman Kari Lenke.

10:30 a.m .: Nine CDU votes not taken into account – probably not a draw in the Lichtenberger constituency

In the hard-fought constituency 3 in Berlin-Lichtenberg, the result has changed again. A recount of the bundles of ballot papers in ballot box 333 showed that that nine votes for the CDU have not been included in the previous result. The recount took place Thursday morning.

The CDU direct candidate Dennis Haustein is now ahead of the direct candidate of the left, Claudia Engelmann. A count of forgotten postal votes on Wednesday had led to a stalemate between the two applicants for the Berlin House of Representatives.
The left has already announced that it will request a complete recount of the electoral district at the meeting of the district electoral committee next week.

8:00 p.m. The drawing of lots in Lichtenberg does not change the balance of power between the SPD and the Greens

The number of seats in the new House of Representatives could be reduced by the votes counted in the Lichtenberg district on Wednesday. Because in a Lichtenberg constituency, the CDU candidate, who has been seen at the front so far, is now level with his left-wing competitor.

State returning officer Bröchler said in the rbb24 evening show that a close result is no reason to count all the votes in the district again. That would only be necessary in the case of legal violations.

If the mandate went to the left, the CDU would have one less overhang mandate and there would also be no compensation mandates. However, it is now considered unlikely that this could lead to a shift in power between the SPD and the Greens in the House of Representatives. There had been corresponding statements yesterday from the district.

The Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district office has confirmed that there was an input error when the results for the election to the district assembly (BVV) were transmitted from polling station 302 and recorded in the election results software. According to the announcement on Wednesday evening, this did not affect the election result, but triggered “a number of necessary corrections”. Accordingly, several values ​​were entered in the wrong rows. For almost all parties, the information had to be corrected:

SPD unchanged
CDU +2 votes
Green +181 votes
Left -178 votes
AfD -79 votes
FDP +5 votes
The party -8 votes

The district office announced that this would have no effect on the distribution of seats in the BVV. The election to the House of Representatives is also not affected.

The deputy FDP state chairman Sebastian Czaja wants to remain active in Berlin politics. “The election defeat is deep,” he tweeted on Wednesday. He sees it primarily as a personal defeat and accepts responsibility for it.

At the small party conference of the state association, he made it clear that he was willing to draw personal conclusions. “I was very touched by the warmth that came towards me from our party,” Czaja tweeted. Therefore, we will now “continue this hard path (…) – together!”

The recount of the ballot papers that were initially left behind in the Lichtenberg district has been completed. The results of the count in constituencies 2,3,4,5 and 6 can see here (overview at the end of the text).

If the stalemate between the left-wing direct candidate Claudia Engelmann and the CDU candidate Dennis Haustein remains, the electoral law provides for a lottery procedure for the direct mandate. Should Haustein retain the mandate, this would not affect the seats in the House of Representatives. If the mandate went to the left, the CDU would have one less seat in the state parliament. The SPD and the Greens would lose one equalization mandate each. The drawing of lots would therefore probably not change anything in the balance of power between the SPD and the Greens.

According to the district returning officer, Axel Hunger, the glitch in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg, as a result of which the votes of 466 postal voters were initially not counted, was due to an internal error. “It has nothing to do with the post office in the Lichtenberg district office or with Deutsche Post,” he said on Wednesday during the subsequent public count of the votes in question.

“It was because we had a communication problem within the district election office,” he said. The voting letters in question had been handed in at the postal voting office in Lichtenberg town hall up to and including Thursday. Then, due to the course of the authority’s internal postal route, it was not possible to bring them to the district election office in time, which is located in another building in the Hohenschönhausen district. Rather, they were left behind and only delivered there on Monday morning.

11.30 a.m.: After counting the first votes from around 450 ballot letters in the Lichtenberg district, the direct candidate of the left, Claudia Engelmann, and the previous leading CDU candidate, Dennis Haustein, are in constituency 3 level.

09.30 am: in Lichtenberg the counting of the ballot letters left behind begins.

More reports about the repeat election in Berlin on Tuesday >>