The Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament, approved this Friday a bill to reduce its number of seats, an aspiration that has been dragging on for years due to the mammoth growth of the chamber due to the mechanisms of electoral law.
The parties of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government coalition (social democrats, environmentalists and liberals) managed with their votes to approve a reform that the opposition -even agreeing with the need to limit the number of seats- considers unconstitutional due to the type of changes planned.
The center-right (CDU/CSU) and the left (Die Linke) announced that they will appeal to the Constitutional Court, which will have to decide if the new law materializes. After a very heated debate, the text was approved by 400 votes in favour, 261 against and 23 abstentions. The number of seats will be limited to 630.
The current hemicycle resulting from the 2021 elections has 736 deputies, making it the largest of all democratically elected parliaments in the world. The Bundestag is outnumbered only by the National People’s Congress of China (2,980 members) and by the unelected House of Lords (777) of the United Kingdom.
The continuous growth of the Bundestag, which initially had 598 seats, is due to the complicated double-vote electoral system. Each voter deposits two votes: one with the name of the deputy they prefer for their constituency (Erststimme) and another with the party list they prefer (Zweitstimme).
The second vote determines the party’s proportional representation in the chamber, but the first guarantees that there is one directly elected deputy in each constituency, so if a party wins more direct seats than it does by proportional representation, a correction is made. of seats upwards and the other parties are also compensated to level the general proportion again.
The text approved this Friday provides for the liquidation of this mechanism for the generation of seats and leveling, with which those directly elected in their constituency would not automatically obtain a seat. Only the parties that obtain 5% will be represented, with the exception of national minorities, such as the SSW party, from the Danish minority of the land of Schleswig-Holstein.
Another clause will also be abolished: the one that allows a party that does not achieve the necessary minimum requirement of 5% in the second vote (Zweitstimme) to obtain parliamentary representation if it obtains three deputies by direct election in constituencies.
This saved the leftist Die Linke party from being left out of the chamber in 2021. Although it had only 4.9% of the vote, three of its candidates won in their respective constituencies. Result: Die Linke has 39 seats. Die Linke is therefore opposed to the reform, as are the Social Christians (CSU). The CSU, which only competes in the Bavarian land, also benefits from the current electoral system, which after the 2021 elections brought it an additional 11 seats.
The Bundestag has been trying to reduce its size for more than ten years, but all the projects have failed, partly because it decides on itself and each party weighs whether it will be at a disadvantage based on the type of changes.
Opinion polls indicate that the majority of Germans (78%, according to a recent poll by the Allensbach polling institute) consider the Bundestag to be too big and too expensive. The 2023 federal budget allocated some 1,400 million euros, including ancillary costs.
