Enlarge image
Reconstruction in the plenary hall of the German Bundestag (archive picture from 2017)
Photo: Florian Gaertner / photothek / imago images
The current polls currently see the SPD at around 25%, the CDU / CSU at 21% and the Greens at around 17%. The result of the union has to be interpreted in such a way that the CDU is likely to receive an average of around 19% to 20% of the votes in the countries in which it competes, while the CSU in Bavaria could get anywhere between 33% and 35% of the votes . This would mean that the CDU would get the worst result in its history in the coming federal elections and the CSU its worst since 1949. The Greens, on the other hand, would achieve by far the best result in their history, even if this was in view of the high expectations they had in the meantime the real consequences of her status as a woman made her fall to dust, should hardly be a consolation for her.
Against this background, there is the not unlikely possibility that we will receive the largest Bundestag in the history of the FRG. As a reminder: after the last general election, the Bundestag was enlarged by 111 seats to a total of 709 seats, starting from its normal size of 598 seats. In 2021, the result could be even more extreme.
The reason for the enlargement of the Bundestag are the overhang and compensation mandates. Surplus mandates arise when a party in a federal state receives more direct mandates than it would be entitled to according to its second votes. But only the second votes are decisive for the distribution of seats between the parties. In order to compensate for the discrepancy caused by the overhang seats, the Bundestag is therefore enlarged until the seating arrangements correspond to the proportions of the second votes of the parties again.
According to the current surveys, it is very likely that the compensation will be based on overhang mandates from the CSU. The CDU and the SPD are also expected to receive overhang mandates. But they would be overrepresented to a lesser extent than the CSU. In addition, under the new electoral law, these overhang seats could be compensated for by offsetting the parties' list seats.
Therefore, the CSU has the key role in the enlargement. With a result of "only" 33% to 35% of the second votes for their circumstances, they too are now experiencing the iron law of the erosion of the popular parties firsthand and have to give up their long-cherished certainty that they have something like a private contract with them God that she could never fall too far below the absolute majority. But even with 33% of the second votes, the CSU would still be the dominant force in Bavaria. The CSU would then have a right to seat around 32 seats, but because of its clear lead over the other parties, it could still possibly win all of the 46 direct seats.
However, according to the new electoral law of 2020, up to three overhang seats can remain unbalanced. In fact, this regulation, which was enforced by the Union, amounts to a kind of "bonus". The party that is most overrepresented by overhanging mandates is then given the privilege of not having to cover three of its direct mandates with its second votes. According to the current survey situation, these three unbalanced overhang mandates would probably go to the CSU.
The Bundestag would therefore only have to be enlarged until the CSU had a right to 43 seats due to its second votes, which would correspond to a size of approx. 800 seats. 11 overhang mandates of the CSU to be compensated would lead to an increase of around 200 seats, a single overhang mandate of the CSU would increase the Bundestag on average by around 18 mandates. As a rule of thumb, one can assume that - based on the reference figure of 33% - there will be less overhang mandate for every additional percentage of the vote by the CSU, or an additional mandate for every percentage less. The size of the Bundestag then changes accordingly.
Each overhang mandate of the CSU is estimated to cost taxpayers at least 40 million euros for one legislative period, which is roughly the cost of 18 mandates. An enlarged Bundestag by 200 seats would therefore lead to additional costs of at least 450 million euros. Some may calm down by saying that this would "only" be the cost of the toll debacle or only a fraction of the cost of one of the not so rare wrong decisions made by the Minister of Health, such as the procurement of masks or the provision of tests. People who are simpler and less tempered due to their political experiences might be of the opinion that this is still a pretty large amount of money that should not be handled too lightly.
To avoid any misunderstandings: We have one of the best and most successful political systems in the world and maintaining it should be worth the costs that it entails. Democracy also has a price in the form of financing its institutions that has to be paid in hard currency. Additional costs for maintaining these institutions without any improvements whatsoever are - as in any other area - an unnecessary waste of resources that could be used more sensibly and effectively elsewhere.
In addition, excessive inflation of the Bundestag does not only result in financial burdens. The reputation of the parties, of politics and thus of the political system would also suffer, because the citizens - not entirely wrongly - would get the impression that the parties thought of themselves above all in their unsuccessful reform. The proposal of the three opposition factions, the Greens, FDP and Left, which was rejected by the government coalition and which had provided for a reduction of the constituencies from the current 299 to 250, which would result in fewer overhang seats from the start, would have at least one of around 120 under the assumptions of the scenario described above Seats produced smaller Bundestag.
It is also generally assumed that the functioning of Parliament could suffer from too much of it. A Bundestag commission, which was set up after the 1994 election, therefore recommended that the Bundestag be reduced from 656 seats, which were the regulars at the time, to less than 600 seats. For these reasons, the former Bundestag President Norbert Lammert also wanted to limit the Bundestag to a maximum of 630 seats. However, he gambled away his credibility as Bismarck's "honest broker" - just like Wolfgang Schäuble a few years later - by the fact that his proposal was too obviously aimed at a clear advantage for the Union.
A bloated Bundestag therefore costs additional money to function poorly and also endangers the reputation of political institutions and democracy. A sustainable reform of the electoral law is therefore urgently required. The decisive factor will be that the parties are taken out of the game as actors with too much self-interest as far as the preparation of proposals is concerned.
However, an ad hoc solution to the problem in the upcoming election would still be possible. It would consist in a coordination of the first votes of the supporters of the SPD, Greens, Left and FDP. In Bavaria, both the SPD and the Greens have realistic chances of winning direct mandates in the urban regions of Munich and Nuremberg, and possibly Augsburg as well. Together with the left, they usually have more votes than the CSU, but their problem is that they take votes away from each other, so that despite their numerical superiority, they often lose out as individual candidates.
Because the SPD and the Greens are not too far apart in these constituencies, there is no natural anchor or coordination point on which party the voters of these parties should concentrate their first votes on in order to be able to challenge the CSU in a promising way. Coordination in the Union-FDP camp, on the other hand, is easy because only the Union has realistic chances of winning a direct mandate, which means that, as a rule, a large proportion of the FDP second-vote voters with the first vote for the candidate Union chooses. The lack of a natural signal could, however, be replaced by a simple rule, for example giving the SPD the first vote in the odd-numbered constituencies and the Greens in the even-numbered constituencies.
Such forms of strategic voting are by no means uncommon; their purpose is to prevent so-called "wasted" votes. Strategic voting therefore in no way represents a falsification of preferences, but is a means of implementing one's own preferences with the greatest possible efficiency, ie giving an otherwise useless voice a greater chance to exert influence at all. This form of coordination is therefore quite desirable in terms of democratic theory and is often also formally implemented in local elections, for example, through institutional regulations such as runoff elections.
For FDP supporters, who would normally cast their first vote in favor of the CSU candidate, the following calculation would again be relevant: You have to ask yourself whether you think that it is actually worth 40 million euros that the person in question is with a direct mandate moves into the Bundestag, if otherwise the real power relations remained exactly the same, if they
do not
give
their first
vote to the CSU candidate. Because the seat shares of the parties depend exclusively on the second votes.
These forms of "strategic voting for the common good" that I have described would not have any influence on the political outcome of the election, but would enable the same political result to be implemented with a significantly smaller Bundestag. If, for example, all six direct mandates in Munich and Nuremberg did not go to the CSU, then this would result in a reduction in the size of the Bundestag, presumably by more than 100 seats. Neither party would be an advantage or a disadvantage because the relative loss of seats would be exactly the same for all parties.
The CSU would not be treated unfairly in any way because it would lose direct mandates, the profit of which it "actually" deserves. Because these direct mandates would only be won due to the lack of coordination skills of the other parties, but the CSU candidate himself would have significantly fewer votes behind him than the opposing camp. He would only be the winner according to the current rule of relative majority voting, but he would not be the "deserved" winner according to an independent and customary standard of justice. Because the major shortcoming of the relative majority vote is precisely that, in the sense of such an independent standard of justice, it often produces the "wrong" winners, as the mathematician Condorcet pointed out as early as the 18th century.
In some circumstances, the winner of a relative majority could even be seen by an absolute majority as the worst candidate of all and still win the constituency if the opposing votes are split very unfavorably. So there is no sound democratic theoretical reason why this particular candidate should win the constituency.
CSU candidates who would win their constituency with a very high relative majority or even an absolute majority would in turn not be endangered by strategic voting that is oriented towards the common good. This form of coordination therefore tends to ensure that the winners are better representatives of their constituencies. Above all, these behaviors enable voters, in the form of a civil society movement, to remedy the problem, at least in part, which the parties were unable to cope with or which they failed to resolve out of disdainful self-interest. If the parties themselves were to support the common good-oriented purpose pursued by it by explicitly coordinating each other, then that would of course only be welcomed.