“Election fraud” or brave?
Reform of the XXL Bundestag splits the MPs
01/18/2023, 06:20 p.m
The Union reacted with sharp accusations to the proposals of the traffic light groups to reform the electoral law. They can’t understand the excitement because they would have to give up mandates themselves if the Bundestag were to become smaller. But there is also contradiction in the SPD.
Knocking yourself out of Parliament is pretty much the opposite of what drives politicians. After all, MPs and those who want to become MPs often have to invest many years of unpaid party work for a mandate. Nevertheless, the members of the Bundestag are determined to abolish themselves to some extent in the current legislative period. An electoral law reform is to be carried out, which will reduce the parliament from 736 MPs to the standard size of 598 seats originally provided for in the Basic Law. At first glance, the angry reactions of the CDU to a corresponding reform proposal by the traffic light factions are all the more surprising: CSU General Secretary Martin Huber accused the coalition of “organized election fraud” on Monday, and CSU member of the Bundestag Stefan Müller complained of a “blatant disregard for the will of the voters”. CDU leader Friedrich Merz described the concept presented as “unacceptable” more mildly but no less decisively.
The sharp choice of words may also be due to the frustration that the Union cannot actually stop the reform. In the Bundestag she was defeated, in the Bundesrat CDU-governed countries would have to organize a majority to stop the project, a so-called objection law. But that fails because the party governs in countries with one or two of the traffic light parties. On the other hand, the traffic light project presented at the weekend is enormous, changing parliamentary democracy and the German understanding of what representation – the representation of the voters’ will by an elected person – should mean like perhaps no other reform since 1949.
Incision in passenger whale
The proposal by the SPD, Greens and FDP would largely abolish the Federal Republic’s mixture of personal and proportional representation. In the future, the Bundestag would be determined by a system of proportional representation. The second votes, which should then be called the main votes, would alone decide on the distribution of seats among the parties that have taken office. Overhang mandates would be eliminated. These always come about when a party has directly won more constituencies and thus gained seats than it is entitled to based on the result of the second vote. In order not to undermine the balance of power, the other parties are then given compensation mandates. Above all, the FDP and the Greens benefit from this regulation, because they won no or only a few direct mandates, but double-digit second vote results.
Today’s multi-party landscape, in which the Union and SPD no longer dominate, has allowed the number of these overhang and compensation mandates to continue to grow. The Bundestag is now a quarter above the target. Election researchers also believed that up to 1,000 deputies were possible without intervention. Not only is that expensive, but for so many parliamentarians there is neither enough space nor tasks. A reform passed by the grand coalition in 2020 has hardly any braking effect. The compromise at that time provided for a redesign of the constituencies for the 2025 federal election, but larger constituencies in less densely populated regions would force the constituency representatives to travel even longer and their voters would see them less often. The way it was cut is also ideal for further disputes, after all constituencies would have to be dissolved, while the new division affects the election result.
“Affects all factions equally”
The traffic light faction, on the other hand, sees any dispute eliminated in advance with their plan. The Parliamentary Secretary of the Greens, Irene Mihalic, said on Wednesday that the loss of seats would affect the parties roughly equally: “All groups are proportionally affected by the same issue.” Katja Mast, who holds the same office in the SPD parliamentary group, took the same line: It was courageous that the traffic light parties were also willing to shrink their own parliamentary groups. “The impressive thing is that our proposal to reform the electoral law affects all parliamentary groups equally.” After Calculations of “time” Based on the 2021 election result, only the CSU share of votes in the Bundestag would fall significantly: from 6.1 to 5.7 percent of all seats in the Bundestag.
However, the Union is not arguing with the handful of lost seats, but with a serious, more fundamental change: in the future, constituency winners could go away empty-handed. The reform reverses the overhang mandate: If a party in a country has achieved a weak second vote result and at the same time obtained more direct mandates than it is entitled to based on the second or main vote, the constituency winners with the weakest vote result get nothing. Whole constituencies could remain in Berlin without political representatives – or they would be represented by someone other than the constituency winner because he or she comes from the constituency and is moving into the Bundestag via the good list position of his party.
“More Than Strong Tobacco”
In independently calculated applications of this model, Die Zeit and the Bertelsmann Foundation arrive at the last election result for five of 299 constituencies that would have remained in Berlin without political representatives. The authors of the draft law rather expect three constituencies without their own representatives in Berlin. 35 more constituencies would be represented by someone other than the outright winner. The CSU, for example, would not have 11 of its 45 mandate holders in the Bundestag, even though they achieved the strongest number of votes in their constituency. So the furor of the CSU is also about your own shirt. The choice of words by the CSU representatives was “more than strong stuff,” criticizes Mast. Mihalic finds the rhetoric of the Christian Socialists “simply terrible among democrats”.
The SPD, Greens and FDP still refer to an offer of talks that they made to the Union and the Left Party. It is completely unclear what bargaining chips they would have to offer there. The Union does not have its own draft law ready. The traffic light parties reject the trench voting system repeatedly brought into play by the CSU. In such a model, the CSU state group would grow to 13 percent, the Greens would shrink by 60 percent, Social Democrat Mast calculates the supposed one-sidedness of the trench election system.
Doubts in the SPD
The SPD parliamentary group already agreed internally on Tuesday to approve the electoral law reform. FDP and Greens want to follow next week. Mast makes no secret of the fact that the debate in the parliamentary group was “controversial”. In the east, the Social Democrats had won numerous direct mandates in 2021. They are on the brink after the reform. In addition, in the east of all places, a relatively large number of constituencies run the risk of not sending a directly elected candidate to Berlin or of being left with no constituency MPs at all. Erik von Malottki, who had conquered the constituency Mecklenburgische Seenplatte 1 – Vorpommern – Greifswald 2 for the SPD, fears that the entire northeast could soon no longer have its own constituency representative in Berlin. “The region feels left behind anyway, now that too,” Malottki told the “Zeit”. He wants to vote against the plan.
Despite the doubts in parts of the SPD, the law should pass the parliament before Easter so that there is enough time to wait for a possible ruling by the constitutional court before the next federal election. It became a little less likely on Wednesday that the Union would file a norm control lawsuit in Karlsruhe. According to information from the Reuters news agency, not enough CDU MPs want to vote to get the necessary 25 percent of parliament. In the CDU, there is still great resentment that the CSU, out of sheer self-interest, thwarted a compromise in the grand coalition with the FDP and the Greens, thereby preventing a more far-reaching electoral reform.
Criticism from the left has so far been limited. The reform concept takes special account of the needs of the party, which is under great pressure. In 2021, the party had not passed the hurdle of 5 percent of the second votes and was only allowed to enter the Bundestag with the strength of a parliamentary group because it had achieved the minimum value of three direct mandates required for this. This so-called basic mandate clause remains unaffected in the draft law. This exception, which emphasizes the value of personal choice, only fits to a limited extent with proportional representation, which will be weighted much more heavily in the future. The traffic light coalition will probably get its project through. The accusation that the reform would also use the reform to knock an opposition party out of parliament, which was already on the ground, was apparently not to be dealt with. Difficult enough to persuade one’s own people to vote against themselves when in doubt.