Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Bigger, younger, more feminine
This is the new Bundestag
The SPD is the strongest force in the new Bundestag, the left has been decimated and Olaf Scholz could sit on the government bench – but what else do you need to know about the new parliament? An overview.
The 20th Bundestag met for its first session and it has already gone down in history. With 736 MPs, it has more members than any of its predecessors. The largest parliamentary group is the SPD with 206 members, followed by the CDU / CSU with 197. In third place are the Greens, who have 118 members. Then come the FDP with 92, the AfD with 82 and the Left with 39 members. There are also two non-attached MPs: Stefan Seidler from the Südschleswigschen Voters’ Association and the AfD politician Matthias Helferich.
At 11 a.m., Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble opened the first session of the newly elected Bundestag. The 79-year-old CDU politician has been a member of the Bundestag since 1972, making it its senior president. Schäuble would have liked to remain President of the Bundestag – but this office traditionally goes to the strongest parliamentary group and thus now to the SPD. So he now has to be content with chairing the session until the election of the new Bundestag President – and then making room for the successor.
This time she will be a woman – only the third in the history of the Bundestag after Annemarie Renger (SPD) and Rita Süssmuth (CDU). The SPD has nominated its MP Bärbel Bas. Your choice is considered certain, as the other parliamentary groups usually support this personnel decision. After your election, Bas will take over the chairmanship of the meeting and will set the tone for your office in her first speech.
279 new, trend towards rejuvenation
279 members are new in parliament, including 104 from the SPD parliamentary group, 66 from Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, 48 from the Union parliamentary group, 28 from the FDP parliamentary group, 23 from the AfD parliamentary group, 8 from the left parliamentary group and the member of the Südschleswigschen Voters’ Association and other non-attached MPs.
The new Bundestag is on average two years younger than the old one. This emerges from the statistics of the Federal Returning Officer after the final election results have been submitted. Accordingly, the average age of the MPs is now 47.3 years. After the 2017 federal election, it was 49.4 years. With 50 MPs, the group of the under 30-year-olds is now much more represented. After the 2017 election there were twelve.
More 30- to 39-year-olds have also received a mandate: Their number rose from 115 to 143. Measured against the size of the parliament, every fourth Bundestag politician is still under 40 (26.2 percent). After the 2017 election, it was not even one in five (17.9 percent). The youngest MP is the 23-year-old Green politician Emilia Fester from Hamburg.
The general trend towards rejuvenation is likely to have political consequences: at the SPD, a quarter of the MPs now belong to the youth organization of the Young Socialists, which was led by Kevin Kühnert until last year. The new Juso chairwoman Jessica Rosenthal also moved into the new Bundestag. The Jusos, traditionally to the left of the SPD establishment, could become an exciting factor in a government coalition led by the rather conservative Scholz with the FDP.
It is the same with the Greens: 19 percent of the Green MPs are between 23 and 29 years old. Many have become politicized in the climate movement. Your expectations of the next federal government’s climate policy measures are high. Also exciting: The Left, which has almost been thrown out of the Bundestag, is – according to its self-image – progressive party, the second oldest parliamentary group after the AfD.
People with a history of migration are still underrepresented in the Bundestag. According to research by the Integration Media Service, the general election was still a small step forward: the proportion of MPs with a migration background rose from 8.2 to 11.3 percent.
More women
The number of female MPs rose from 218 to 256. The fact that the proportion of women has risen can only be partially attributed to the parties of the left-wing camp: in the Union, namely, the proportion of women has risen from around 25 to around 31 percent, because the heavy losses of the Union hit the gentlemen from the CDU in particular: They are more represented among the direct election candidates than on the state election lists, where the state and federal parties are trying to achieve more parity. However, whoever the constituencies put up as candidates, the male-dominated local associations cannot be told from any capital city. While the CSU was able to hold almost all constituencies despite losing votes, many CDU men lost their constituency to the SPD, AfD and even to the Greens.
As with age, the Greens and AfD are at different ends of the spectrum when it comes to gender. With 59 percent women, the Greens are the most feminine parliamentary group, with 69 women also including Tessa Ganserer and Nyke Slawik, the first openly transgender MPs. If there are transidentitarian AfD MPs, they are at least not publicly known. The gender ratio in this parliamentary group is 72 to 11, around 13 percent – half of the Bundestag average.
Merkel no longer there
In terms of the distribution of professions, not much has changed: Most MPs come from the field of “business organization, law, administration”: 532 of the 736 MPs are either lawyers, tax consultants, come from accounting or finance, administration or corporate management (2017 : 511). This is followed by humanities scholars, advertising and marketing specialists, and cultural and media workers (65, 2017: 53), followed by health and social professions, teachers and educators (59, 2017: 54). Craftsmen, farmers (8) or merchants (16) are hardly represented.
It is also clear that there will now be at least one less physicist in the Bundestag. Angela Merkel is leaving parliament and will be formally dismissed this Tuesday by Federal President Steinmeier and her ministers. However, it remains in office on a provisional basis until a new government is formed. Despite the lack of a mandate, the Chancellor is present at the first Bundestag session after the election. She is following the matter from the official gallery.