Dhe Bundestag has voted in favor of the controversial reform of the electoral law, with which the parliament is to be reduced. 400 MEPs voted in favor of the proposal, 261 against and 23 abstained. The project has met with severe criticism, especially from the CSU and the left.
With the reform, the Bundestag, which has grown to 736 MPs, is to be permanently reduced to 630 seats from the next election. This is to be achieved by completely dispensing with overhang and equalization mandates.
Overhang mandates arise when a party wins more seats in the Bundestag via direct mandates than it is entitled to based on the result of the second vote. You can keep these seats, the other parties receive compensatory mandates in return. According to the new rules, it could happen in the future that an applicant wins his constituency directly, but still does not get into the Bundestag.
This angers the CSU in particular. In addition, according to the traffic light draft, a strict five percent clause should apply. The so-called basic mandate clause does not apply. So far, it has led to parties entering the Bundestag with the strength of their second vote result if they were less than five percent but won at least three direct mandates. The Left Party benefited from this in the 2021 election. If the clause is deleted, depending on the election result, this could also have consequences for the Bavarian regional party CSU in the future.
In the final heated debate on Friday, politicians from the traffic light parties accused the Union of a lack of willingness to change. The domestic policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Sebastian Hartmann, said on Friday before the planned vote that the aim of the project was “a simple, understandable right to vote”.
CSU and Left against it
The project is strictly rejected by the Union and the Left Party. CSU regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt said the plan aimed to force the left out of parliament and to question “the CSU’s right to exist”. “You are making a reform for yourself here” in order to cement the “traffic light’s claim to power”, he accused Hartmann.
The former Bundestag Presidents Wolfgang Schäuble and Rita Süssmuth (both CDU) have criticized the planned reform of the electoral law. The new electoral law creates a system “that is designed to deceive and disappoint the voter,” Schäuble told Der Spiegel magazine. He justified this criticism with the fact that in future not every constituency candidate placed first can actually count on actually getting a seat in the Bundestag. “The concept of the traffic light coalition for electoral law reform is constitutionally and politically problematic,” said Schäuble.
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