A reform that would have helped reduce the number of members of the German parliament has been rejected. The supreme court in Karlsruhe ruled on the morning of July 30 on the legality of a plan that would have helped reduce the number of seats for elected officials in Germany and at the same time would have blocked smaller regional parties from accessing the Bundestag. The main body of German democracy is the largest single-chamber parliament in Europe, currently sitting with 733 members of parliament, representing a population of 83.8 million. This body is even larger than the European Parliament, where 720 members of parliament from 27 countries represent the 448.4 million citizens of the EU bloc.
The reform was introduced by the parties of the governing coalition, led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, but was deemed “partly unconstitutional” by the judges. The Bavarian Christian Social Union and the Left Party are celebrating the ruling, as they would have suffered the most from the consequences of the new rule, risking being left out of the next parliament. On the other hand, supporters of austerity are furious. The new rules would have saved, according to the government’s calculations, at least 310 million euros of taxpayers’ money for the next legislation. So a Bundestag perhaps less efficient, but more representative of the different souls of Germany.
The 5% Rule and Its Exception
The plan of the coalition government of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals aimed to abolish an exception to the 5% rule. This is the threshold that parties must reach to enter the German parliament. There is, however, one exception: parties that come first in at least three single-member constituencies receive parliamentary seats in proportion to their share of the vote, even if the 5% threshold has not been reached nationwide. Under the current system, additional seats are created each time so that the overall distribution remains proportional, even if the parties’ candidates win individual constituencies. However, this system has led to an “explosion” of the Bundestagwhich reached 733 elected representatives.
The reasons for the reform
The Scholz-led coalition’s reform was justified by the intention of halting the tendency of the Federal Parliament to become increasingly larger and more cumbersome. According to legal experts, by eliminating the exception to the 5% threshold and with other measures, the number of parliamentarians would have fallen by at least 100 seats, bringing the Bundestag to only 630 deputies. However, the court has deemed the provisions contained in the reform “partly unconstitutional”, because the elimination of this exception would damage the equal treatment of the parties.
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The German electoral system was designed in the post-war period to avoid the fragmentation of parliament and the proliferation of smaller parties that had fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in the 1930s. For this reason, it allows only parties that obtain 5% of the vote to be seated in parliament. The only exception to this rule, advantageous to small regional parties, had been targeted by the government led by Olaf Scholz.
Who benefits from the ruling
The most recent beneficiary of the exception has been the Left Party, which is very strong in the former East Germany but still weak nationally. The successor to the East German Communist Party, the Left Party has won three directly elected mandates and formed a group with dozens of legislators in the Bundestag, despite receiving only 4.9% of the vote nationally. The Bavarian Christian Social Union, which has been in close alliance with the Christian Democrats, who have been in government with Angela Merkel for years and in opposition since 2021, has also benefited from the exception for a long time. This party only runs in the southeastern regions of Germany and rarely gets more than 5% nationally. At the same time, it has become a fixture in parliament, as it tends to win most of Bavaria’s 45 constituencies.
