Kempten / District - The next Bundestag, which the citizens will elect next week, could be as big as none of its predecessors.
The reason why there could soon be more than 800 members in parliament is the so-called overhang and equalization mandates.
In the election procedure that applies to the Bundestag, the personalized proportional representation, each voter casts two votes.
With the second vote, he chooses the country list of the party he prefers;
he gives his first vote to the direct candidate he prefers in the constituency.
If a party wins more direct mandates than list candidates would move into the Bundestag due to their second share of the vote, it receives additional mandates to compensate for this difference.
There are actually only 598 members in the Bundestag
However, this procedure carries the risk that the second vote shares of the parties elected in the Bundestag are not correctly reflected in the distribution of seats, because the majority ratios may be distorted by the overhang seats. That is why those parties who would be disadvantaged as a result receive compensation mandates. These ensure that they are represented in parliament in the strength envisaged by the voter with a second vote. Overhang and compensatory mandates can therefore significantly enlarge the Bundestag. There are already 709 members in the federal parliament, which is still in office, although the federal electoral law only provides for 598.
Experience shows that the CSU receives a particularly large number of overhang mandates.
Because even if the polls of the last few weeks have not developed in their favor and they received their second worst result since 1946 in the most recent state election in 2018, the Christian Socials could again win most of the constituencies for themselves.
Numerous attempts to downsize the Bundestag
Critics of the possible progressive expansion of the Bundestag fear that such a bloated parliament is not only much more expensive, but also less capable of acting.
For years there have been repeated attempts to reform the electoral law and to streamline the Bundestag in this way.
The electoral reform passed last year is unlikely to change the 'growth mechanism' described here.
For example, the political scientist Joachim Behnke, who teaches at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, recently calculated in an article for the magazine “Spiegel”: If the CSU received around 33 percent of the second vote in the upcoming federal election, it would have “a seat claim for approximately 32 mandates, but could still possibly win all of the 46 direct mandates because of its clear lead over the other parties ”.
The Christian Socials would therefore get 14 overhang mandates.
Expensive Bundestag
Since the new federal election law stipulates that up to three overhang seats do not have to be compensated, the total number of parliamentary seats would then have to be increased so that only eleven overhang seats are compensated and all parties are represented again according to their second vote shares.
These numbers may seem unspectacular at first glance, but Behnke makes it clear that this small difference alone would lead to a Bundestag with around 800 members: A "single overhang mandate" would increase "the Bundestag by about 18 seats on average". Each overhang mandate costs “the taxpayer for one legislative period an estimated at least 40 million euros, which is roughly the cost of 18 mandates,” explains the political scientist. "A Bundestag enlarged by 200 seats would therefore lead to additional costs of at least 450 million euros."