The traffic light coalition will soon, with a slight delay, tackle another of its ambitious projects from the coalition agreement: the SPD, Greens and FDP will present a draft law on electoral law reform. The coalition agreement states that the traffic light wants to “revise the right to vote within the first year”. This would finally bring a result to a tough debate that had lasted for years.
The aim is to prevent the Bundestag from growing and effectively shrinking it towards legal size. That’s 598 seats. Parliament currently has 736 MPs. After Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) had spoken twice in the autumn with the urgent request to hurry up, SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich has meanwhile announced implementation.
A little haste is necessary because the black-red coalition had launched a kind of partial reform. According to current electoral law, the number of constituencies must be reduced from 299 to 280 for the 2025 election. This should result in fewer overhangs and thus fewer compensation mandates. According to the current survey situation, this does not bring the Bundestag to 598 seats. But the reshaping of the constituencies is already in preparation.
Traffic light wants to limit to 598 seats
The traffic light coalition has proposed a solution within the framework of the electoral law commission of the Bundestag in which there are still 299 constituencies. At the same time, it should always remain at 598 seats. The traffic light proposal achieves this by strictly allocating only as many mandates to the parties as corresponds to their share of second votes.
If a party has won direct mandates beyond the second vote proportional representation, i.e. surpluses, as many direct mandates should not be allocated as the result of the proportional representation after second votes requires. It will always hit those constituency winners with the weakest first vote results in percentage terms.
With this, the traffic light has opted for a solution that has been known as the capping model for many years, with a somewhat new justification. The Greens had already favored it and written a draft law for it, most recently it was presented by the AfD as a separate proposal. In order to still have directly elected MPs in all constituencies, according to the previous traffic light plan, a substitute vote (“third vote”) should be used to determine who moves into the Bundestag instead of the constituency winners who were capped.
It is the informed who find reform urgent.
Luke Haffertpolitical scientist
However, it is not entirely clear whether this will also be included in the draft law. On the other hand, it seems certain that no agreement has yet been reached with the Union. The leader of the Greens parliamentary group, Britta Haßelmann, announced that the coalition wanted to “advertise for the broadest possible support”. And in the further parliamentary procedure, a bill can also be changed.
The reaction of the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the electoral law commission, Ansgar Heveling, does not indicate broad support for the time being. He considers the traffic light model to be unconstitutional, hints at a lawsuit in Karlsruhe and accuses the government factions of having made “no serious attempt” to “seek a common path with a broad majority for constitutional electoral law”.
Informal discussions without result
According to information from the Tagesspiegel, there have been informal talks at the level of the faction leaders. However, these do not seem to have brought any results. It is also unclear how large the number of those in the traffic light groups are who are not convinced of their own side’s proposal. Last year there was talk of around 40 skeptics across the parliamentary groups. In some countries, if the model had applied to the 2021 election, a “capping” would also have affected social democrats, not least in North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg.
So far, the electoral debate has been very limited to parliament. The electoral law commission also brought little publicity. But what do voters think? A study by the political scientist Lukas Haffert from the University of Zurich points in one direction, at least to some extent. It reads: Neither the traffic light model was in front in a panel of a good 3,000 people surveyed by Haffert, nor the so-called moat election system favored by the Union faction, which the CDU and CSU have recently dubbed the “real two-vote system”. .
This panel was most likely to agree to a solution that was discussed in the Bundestag but was quickly rejected: a significant reduction in the number of constituencies. Haffert presented the panel with a reduction to 225 seats. Another result of the panel survey: Very few of the participants consider the status quo to be worth preserving. The better the level of knowledge about electoral law, the greater the desire for reform. “It’s the well-informed who find reform urgent,” Haffert concludes. The preference in this group, about a quarter of the panel, goes particularly strongly in the direction of constituency reduction.
A current survey by the Allensbach Institute for the Bertelsmann Foundation shows that the general population has high expectations. Accordingly, 78 percent of those surveyed are of the opinion that the Bundestag with 736 seats is far too large. It should be reduced back to the normal size of 598 mandates. Two-thirds are also of the opinion that the electoral system must be easy to understand and that no party should have an advantage over other parties through the electoral system.
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