Volker Ulrich was in no mood for the usual magnanimous pleasantries on in Augsburg. The Bavarian politician, candidate for the , had just discovered that, despite winning his constituency, he would not be entering parliament after all.
That was down to an electoral reform : To reduce the unwieldy and increasingly costly size of the parliament, which reached a record 735 parliamentarians in 2021, coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats agreed to cap the number of Bundestag members at 630.
Germans get two votes in each general election, designed to balance local representatives and national parties: The “first” vote is for their preferred local candidate, the “second” vote for the national party they support. As the party’s overall representation — determined by the “second vote” — was not allowed to exceed their proportional representation in parliament, 23 candidates across Germany who won the most direct “first votes” for their seat couldn’t enter parliament.
One of these unlucky winners was Ulrich, and he was seething. So when Green Party candidate Claudia Roth — who had voted with her party for the reform but was herself assured of a parliamentary seat via the second vote — came over to congratulate him, the winning conservative saw not green but red. In an ugly exchange captured on camera and inevitably uploaded to X, Ulrich refused to shake Roth’s hand and told her: “You are not a democrat!”
Ulrich later apologized for his outburst but maintained that his point was valid: The electoral reform passed by the previous government was “unfair and undemocratic,” he wrote on X.
CDU to reform the reform
In the aftermath of the election, , leader of the victorious conservative alliance of the and the CSU, vowed to overhaul the election reform. The likely next chancellor claimed it had been designed specifically to disadvantage his bloc — because the CDU/CSU is always likely to win the most direct candidates. Indeed, 18 of the winning candidates deprived of a Bundestag seat on Sunda were from the CDU/CSU.
In recent days, has gone so far as to threaten to make scrapping the reform a condition in the upcoming coalition talks with the Social Democrats, claiming that his state of Bavaria, lost out. “It was a final act of revenge by the government on southern Germany. We will change that again,” he vowed to public broadcaster ARD.
But that would come too late for Yannick Schwander, CDU candidate in Frankfurt, who won his district by a margin of only 0.3% of the vote. Since the new rules meant those with the narrowest wins were the first to miss out, he already knew his fate on election night. “It was indeed very annoying,” he told DW. “I think the reform undermines one of the basic principles in a democracy: The person who gets the most votes gets the mandate. We keep talking about strengthening direct democracy in Germany, and this was an instrument of direct democracy that was undermined by this reform.”
But some experts aren’t so sure. Sebastian Jäckle, political scientist at Freiburg University, who modelled various scenarios under the new rules, said that he could understand why winning-but-losing candidates felt hard done by, but said that the German constitution did not guarantee the direct representation that Schwander described.
In fact, Jäckle points out that Article 38 of Germany’s says the opposite: “All parliamentarians are representatives of the ‘whole people,’ and not any particular electoral district, so I think the criticism that the reform is undemocratic can’t be supported,” he told DW.
Though the Bundestag is comprised of 299 directly-elected members and 331 PR members, when it comes to their actual parliamentary work, there is no formal difference between them.
But try telling that to any of the candidates who campaigned in their constituencies promising to “represent the people of” a certain town. In fact, some moderately-sized cities like Darmstadt ended up without any direct representatives in the new Bundestag at all.
A more polarized Bundestag?
The new rules raise another concern: The threat of further polarization. Since the closest results tended to be in districts where there is a greater range of political views — often urban areas — candidates in those places tended to be more moderate to try to appeal to more voters.
Schwander thinks this means that the reform will end up polarizing political debate in the new Bundestag over the next four years. “Germany has always had a big divide between town and country,” he said. “Centrist parties like mine, the CDU/CSU, will now send more rural candidates into the Bundestag, who tend to be more conservative. At the same time, on the left, there will be more representatives from big cities who are significantly more left-wing, while pragmatic left-wing politicians from rural areas will miss out.”
Political scientist Jäckle agrees that this is not ideal: “There is something to that,” he said. “We have a polarization between city and country in the Bundestag, between left and right, and that is a bit of a problem for democracy.”
What’s the compromise?
Though there was a consensus that the Bundestag was much too bloated, finding a compromise that everyone will be happy with won’t be easy. One solution might be to simply reduce the number of electoral districts by making fewer, larger ones. But this would lead to complicated rows over how the new borders should be drawn. Bitter accusations of gerrymandering would be inevitable.
“One could also change the entire electoral law, by introducing parallel voting,” said Schwander.
Parallel voting means creating two entirely separate groups of parliamentarians that do not affect one another mathematically: One group is elected directly by district, the other nationally by proportional representation. Such a system has been proposed before, most recently in 2022, when the Bundestag was hashing out plans to reform the old system. It sounds simple enough, but it was opposed by smaller parties who felt their representation would be likely to suffer.
“All these systems have their advantages and disadvantages,” said Schwander. “But I think what is really important is that, if we do discuss a reform, that we include different viewpoints — the fact is we need to find a reform that on the one hand keeps the Bundestag as small as possible, but on other hand the preserves the basic principle that an election victory leads to a mandate.”
Edited by Rina Goldenberg
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