All parliamentary groups say that the Bundestag, with currently 736 MPs, is far too large. However, how it can get smaller again is controversial – including the advance of the traffic light. An overview.
The parties are now in their third electoral term struggling to reform the electoral law that will make the bloated XXL Bundestag smaller again. So far, the CDU and CSU in particular have prevented effective reform because they benefited the most from the existing rules. The Union is also up in arms against the draft law now presented by the traffic light groups.
Why is the Bundestag getting bigger and bigger?
According to Paragraph 1 of the Federal Elections Act, the Bundestag consists of 598 members. However, there is also the wording “subject to the deviations resulting from this law”. These deviations are caused by overhang and compensation mandates, which have led to the Bundestag being larger than ever before with 736 MPs. In the 19th electoral term from 2017 to 2021 there were 709 MPs and in the 18th electoral term 631.
How do overhang and compensation mandates work?
In the general election, every voter has two votes. The first vote directly elects an MP in each of the 299 constituencies. The decisive factor for a party’s seats in parliament, however, is the result of its second votes. Only: If she wins more direct mandates than she is entitled to based on the second vote result, she can keep these so-called overhang mandates. Since the 2013 election, the other parties have been given compensatory mandates in order to restore the balance of power determined after the result of the second vote.
What do the traffic light factions want to do differently now?
The draft law by the SPD, Greens and FDP caps the number of mandates to a certain extent. 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 a party has in the Bundestag. In order to make the meaning of the second voice clear, it will be called the main voice in the future. The first vote is called the constituency vote.
How exactly does the seat allocation work?
First, the number of second votes is used to determine how many of the 598 mandates a party is entitled to nationwide. Then this is converted to each federal state. 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 worst constituency vote result get nothing.
What does that look like in practice?
Take Bavaria, for example: the CSU directly won 45 of the 46 constituencies in the last federal election. According to her second or main vote result, however, she would only have been granted 34 seats in the Bundestag. According to the previous electoral law, she was allowed to keep the eleven overhang mandates. According to the traffic light bill, on the other hand, the eleven directly elected MPs with the worst first vote or constituency vote results would get nothing. They didn’t get a mandate.
Would the CSU then be unilaterally disadvantaged?
The CSU likes to claim that, but it’s not true. Because all major parties in the Bundestag benefit from the regulation of overhang and equalization mandates – some more, others less. If it fell away, all feathers would also have to drop. There were 138 of them in the 2021 federal election. Of these, 41 were from the Union, 36 from the SPD, 24 from the Greens, 16 from the FDP, 14 from the AfD, and 7 from the Linke.
What ideas does the CDU/CSU faction have?
The Union has not submitted its own draft law. In the commission set up by the Bundestag to reform electoral law and modernize parliamentary work, its members proposed what is known as pure trench electoral law. After that, 299 MPs would be directly elected as before and, completely independently, another 299 MPs would be elected via the second vote.
The parties thus received all direct mandates, but there would be no more compensatory mandates. The Union would benefit from this, as a look at the 2021 election shows: the CDU and CSU received 23 overhang mandates, the SPD 10 and the AfD 1. 104 compensation mandates would have been lost – most of them in the SPD (26) and Greens (24). The three traffic light parties would have 66 fewer seats, while the CDU/CSU would only have lost 18 seats.
What happens now?
The draft law by the SPD, Greens and FDP will first be discussed in the parliamentary groups starting this Tuesday. It is almost impossible that there will be a compromise with the Union. Both models are not compatible with each other.
The draft law is not likely to meet with undivided enthusiasm in the traffic light parliamentary groups either, because some members of parliament can calculate that they will no longer be able to get into the Bundestag in the next election. However, the traffic light groups can pass the law with their majority in Parliament.
Is that really desirable?
Actually, the goal is to make such far-reaching decisions in the Bundestag with a large majority. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) has repeatedly expressed the hope of finding a broad common denominator.
On the other hand, the grand coalition, for example, passed a small and ineffective electoral law reform in the last electoral term, also against all other parliamentary groups. If the traffic light were to do the same now, the Union would almost certainly appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court and have the new rules checked for their constitutionality.
Source: Stern
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