Berliners have to re-elect the House of Representatives

It had already become apparent during the oral hearing in September, and now it is certain: so much went wrong in the last Berlin elections that they have to be repeated in their entirety. The country’s Constitutional Court announced a corresponding verdict on Wednesday.

On February 12, the state parliament – ​​here it is called the House of Representatives – will be re-elected, as will the district assemblies. The constitutional judges did not skimp on verbal slaps. It is an unprecedented event in the history of German elections. An election has never been declared invalid in its entirety.

The Social Democratic Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey now has to tremble for her re-election. It was her dream to rule this town, and when things go bad, it’s gone before she can even get to work. But she has no choice but to accept the challenge. There will be no appeals against the verdict, she said on television – she couldn’t do it either, because there aren’t any.

There is no legal remedy

Another special feature of Berlin is the single-stage procedure: the Constitutional Court is the only factual and legal review authority. Even those who now wanted to go to the Federal Constitutional Court with a constitutional complaint would not be able to achieve any further delay.

And delay, some would have liked that. The interior authorities had themselves lodged an objection to the election, but repeating it in its entirety went too far. At the hearing, the lawyers for the interior administration argued that further evidence would have to be collected first and that they were allowed to send further pleadings.

The court now wrote succinctly that the entire statement by those involved had been noted and no, further evidence was not necessary at all, what was already known was bad enough. Especially since the state returning officer Ulrike Rockmann, who had also lodged an objection, had unintentionally supplied the court with further fodder. During the oral hearing at the end of September, she suddenly pulled tables out of her pocket that were supposed to show that everything wasn’t that bad. But for the court, the numbers showed just the opposite. In addition, the judges had previously requested these numbers for weeks without any result.

What exactly happened on September 26, 2021? There were four votes in Berlin, namely the federal election, the state election, the election to the district assemblies and the referendum on the expropriation of large housing companies. Six votes were to be cast on five ballot papers. Rockmann, the election officer, had calculated three minutes for this.

The polling stations were open almost 22,000 minutes after 6 p.m

However, it took voters much longer to find their way through the mass of papers, and there were not enough voting booths, so long queues formed. With Rockmann’s calculations, in some districts not even 40 percent of those eligible to vote would have been able to vote in person. If one had assumed five minutes more realistically, it would have been even less, namely 26 percent. One cannot assume that the others all voted by post, the court complained.

In addition, there were no ballots, or the wrong ones were there, and then a large part of the city center was closed for the Berlin marathon, so that couriers with ballot papers could not get through. In total, polling stations were closed for 6,294 minutes when they should have been open, and then open for 21,941 minutes when they should have been closed. So those who wanted to vote stood in line and could follow the 6 p.m. projections on their cell phones – an illegal situation. This does not meet the requirements for an unbiased election.

Even the preparation was so bad that it was classified as an electoral error, said court president Ludgera Selting. The mistakes are also relevant to the mandate, and the citizens’ interest in correcting them outweighs Parliament’s interest in the continuance. A partial new election would not be like a snapshot of the people’s will, it would have to be completely re-elected.

Now it starts again – posters only after Christmas

The election campaign began immediately after the trial in September and became even hotter after the verdict was announced on Wednesday. The General Secretary of the Berlin CDU, Stefan Evers, described the verdict as a “serious defeat for Ms. Giffey and her Senate”. Only the satirical party The party kept its humor and said: “From now on we will repeat all elections that we do not win.” The party also appealed.

So here we go again. Mathematically, the posters would be up by Christmas, but the Berliners are spared that: Thanks to a change in the road law, they will probably be able to celebrate the New Year in peace, because in the present case the posters are only allowed to be up six weeks before instead of seven weeks before. On January 2nd, the city is full of election advertising. Parliament is allowed to continue working so that there is no vacuum. What it has decided shall apply. The retired MP Marcel Luthe, formerly FDP, now Free Voters, wants to take action against it. He is convinced that “an assembly resulting from invalid elections cannot be a parliament”.

The court did not have to decide on the repeat of the Bundestag elections – that is done by the Bundestag. He decided that a repeat should take place in some of the Berlin polling stations. This decision is not yet final. Putting the two together is now no longer possible.