Ja, what the German Bundestag decided on Friday morning is a rogue act: a reform of the federal election law, which proves a lot, but not the ability of the parliament to reform the traffic light groups intended. With the law, which fixes the number of deputies at 630, the Bundestag has certainly come closer to its goal of reducing the largest freely elected parliament in the world to a workable size.
But even this number was the result of a subsequent politicization of the reform proposals presented in January by the SPD, Greens and FDP. Two months ago, the coalition factions wanted to leave it at 598 MPs. Now, with a view to the possibility that things could get tight for the FDP in the next election, they are treating themselves to 32 more MPs. Only when measured against today’s number of 736 MEPs is this a compromise with a sense of proportion.
Union experts
Representing the enlargement as a reduction is just one of several oddities of this political spectacle. The much more dramatic act is the abolition of the so-called basic mandate clause. It was the experts from the CDU and CSU, of all people, who gave the traffic light coalition the arguments to claim the unconstitutionality of the regulation, according to which winning three direct mandates is sufficient to override the nationwide five percent hurdle when counting second votes.
The traffic light coalition didn’t need to be told twice, since it offered them the theoretical possibility of not only knocking the Left Party out of parliament, but also the CSU at the same time. Whether this procedure is constitutional remains to be seen. But it is already clear that the traffic light has done a disservice to German federalism, which has developed over decades. It is justified to accuse the CSU of having politicized the right to vote in the Bundestag for their particular interests for ten years. Doing the same thing as the Bavarian regional party and its sister CDU, which is held jointly liable, is not a celebration of democracy, but a tragedy.
It doesn’t matter what the result of the Federal Constitutional Court’s examination of the reform that has now been decided: at the next opportunity the Union will leave no stone unturned to change the electoral law again. If the aim of the legislative process was to prove to the citizen that the Bundestag is capable of reforming its own affairs and in this way to strengthen trust in representative democracy – the result could hardly be more devastating.
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