Saturday, September 25, 2021
Election researcher’s bill
More than 900 members of the Bundestag possible
With 709 members, the Bundestag is bigger than ever. In the election this Sunday, it could grow even further. The decisive factor will be how the voters distribute the first and second votes.
According to calculations by election researcher Robert Vehrkamp, the next Bundestag, which will be elected this Sunday, could have more than 900 members. On the basis of the last ZDF “Politbarometer” before Thursday’s election, the researcher from the Bertelsmann Foundation calculated a range of 672 to 912 mandates. In a medium scenario it comes to 810 MPs. The Bundestag currently has 709 members, making it bigger than ever before.
More than two thirds of Germans already think this is too big. In a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency, 71 percent said that there were too many MPs in parliament. 11 percent said they thought the number of seats was just right. Only 3 percent thought the Bundestag had to be enlarged.
The research group Wahlen determined the following polls for the “Politbarometer”: SPD 25 percent, CDU / CSU 23, Greens 16.5, FDP 11, AfD 10 and Left 6 percent. In the last numbers of the “RTL / ntv trend barometer” the numbers look almost identical. There the parties could expect the following result: SPD 25 percent (Bundestag election 2017: 20.5), CDU / CSU 22 percent (32.9), Greens 17 percent (8.9), FDP 12 percent (10.7), AfD 10 percent (12.6), left 6 percent (9.2).
Difficult prognosis
The three scenarios for the number of MPs differed solely in the different assumptions about the splitting of first and second votes, said Vehrkamp. This splitting behavior is very difficult to predict. According to Vehrkamp, the middle scenario with 810 MPs is by no means extreme. According to his account, it assumes that almost half of those voters who vote for the FDP with the second vote give their first vote to the Union, and that at the same time, as usual, more than 80 percent of the Union voters do so with both votes. In the 2013 federal election, 63 percent of all FDP voters split in favor of the Union.
The standard size of the Bundestag is 598 MPs – 299 MPs directly elected in the constituencies with the first vote and 299 MPs recruited via the state lists. However, this number is increasing as a result of overhang and compensation mandates. Surplus mandates arise when a party receives more direct mandates than it is entitled to based on the second vote result. The parties are allowed to keep these overhang mandates. So that the majority ratios determined by the second vote result are actually reflected in the Bundestag, the other parties receive compensation mandates for this.
In the 2017 federal election there were 46 overhang and 65 compensatory mandates, four years earlier there were only 4 overhang and 29 compensatory mandates. The overhang mandates were distributed as follows in 2017: CDU 36, CSU 7, SPD 3. Instead, there were these compensatory mandates: SPD 19, FDP 15, AfD 11, Linke 10, Greens 10. Only since the federal election in 2013 have all overhang mandates been fully compensated by compensatory mandates.