Overhang seats could inflate the future Bundestag to 940 seats and thereby significantly falsify the election result.
The opposition is suing the "sham package".
Berlin - When the rule becomes the exception: There should actually be 598 members in the German Bundestag.
Half of them, namely 299, are directly elected via the first vote in the constituencies, the other half moves into the Bundestag depending on the second votes via the state lists of the parties.
But it is not as simple as it is on the ballot.
Since reunification, however, the Bundestag has had more than 600 members without exception, and even 702 since the last election in 2017 - and in 2021 it could be bursting at the seams.
According to the current survey trend, this could be a decisive factor for Armin Laschet and the Union.
Election 2021: That is why the Bundestag could burst at the seams in autumn
The fact that the Bundestag always exceeds its normal size is due to the so-called overhang mandates.
They are awarded if a party in a federal state wins more direct mandates than it is entitled to there after the second vote result.
Since reunification, they have increased and increasingly distorted the balance of power in parliament.
In theory, overhang seats could even have turned an election result into the opposite.
To counteract this, there have been so-called compensation mandates in addition to the overhang mandates since 2013: If a party receives overhang mandates, the total number of seats in the Bundestag is increased until the size ratio of the parliamentary groups in the Bundestag precisely reflects the proportion of second votes in the election.
The Bundestag is getting bigger and bigger.
Federal Parliament election 2021: rule is considered "extremely unlikely"
How many members the future Bundestag will actually count can only be calculated once the last vote has been counted after the Bundestag election on September 26th. But there are already forecasts today. Dr. Robert Vehrkamp made a few calculations with the Bertelsmann Stiftung's mandate calculator and the latest polls - and came up with a not unlikely scenario that would result in an XXL Bundestag with 940 members.
In Scenario 1, which is the standard of the German Bundestag, the narrow second majority of votes in a traffic light coalition (Greens, SPD and FDP) of 46.6 percent compared to 46.3 percent of the three other parliamentary groups represented in the Bundestag (CDU / CSU, AfD and Left) the distribution of mandates in a narrow majority of 300 to 298 mandates in favor of the traffic light parties.
Vehrkamp describes it as "extremely unlikely" that the rule will occur, because the calculated scenario is based on very unusual splitting assumptions of first and second votes.
The same applies to scenario 2, a Bundestag with 701 seats, as is currently the case.
Federal election 2021: Why Laschet could become Chancellor despite losing the election
On the other hand, scenario 3, in which the Bundestag inflates to 853 mandates, is more likely. In addition - and this is even more important - there is a “majority-decisive distortion of proportional representation”. Despite the second vote lead of the traffic light parties of 46.6 percent compared to 46.3 percent for CDU / CSU, AfD and Left, the majority parties only receive 426 seats, while the other three parliamentary groups approve 427. The big winners in this scenario: Armin Laschet and the Union.
The same applies to scenario 4, a splitting of first and second votes that is “plausibly imaginable” from the voter's point of view, which would result in a Bundestag with a total of 940 seats and a banished electoral seat ratio as in scenario 3.
But how can a distribution of seats occur that does not correspond to the votes cast in spite of compensation mandates?
Since a reform last year, however, the compensation has only started after the third overhang mandate.
Federal election 2021: Opposition has long since complained against the "sham package"
Dr. Robert Vehrkamp speaks of a “majority distorting effect” of the reform. And the whole thing is not even an unintentional consequence, but the result of a "deliberate optional implementation decision". The opposition parties therefore sued the Federal Constitutional Court in February of that year - against the “sham package”, as they called the new electoral law. It is unclear whether a decision will be made before the election.
