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A few more seats will soon be installed here: the plenary hall in the Bundestag
Photo: Michael Kappeler / dpa
The formation of a government is still open, but one thing is already certain: The new Bundestag will be the largest of all time and one of the largest parliaments in the world.
As strange as it sounds, this is due to the comparatively poor performance of the CSU in this election - at least in the second votes.
And the unwillingness of the past grand coalition to change anything - again largely because of the CSU, which blocked real reform.
A special feature of the federal electoral law means that the Bundestag is once again larger than originally intended.
The Federal Returning Officer now specifies the new Bundestag with 735 seats.
After the last election there were already 709 seats, instead of the 598 that had been set. "Basically, what has happened is what experts have been predicting for years," says Joachim Behnke, political scientist at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen.
"It didn't turn out quite as bad as feared in the worst-case scenarios, but the latest reform, which was actually supposed to lead to a downsizing of the Bundestag, has finally proven unsuitable."
Many direct candidates for the CSU
This has the following reason: Even if the second vote result for the CSU is comparatively weak with historically poor 31.7 percent, it still managed to win 45 of the 46 constituencies in Bavaria with its direct candidates. The candidates from the SPD and the Greens mutually took away the first votes in several constituencies, although together they would have had a majority if only one applicant had been agreed, as the Greens in Thuringia demonstrated.
This means that the CSU is sending significantly more MPs to Berlin than it is actually entitled to according to the second vote result, which is decisive for the proportional distribution, one speaks of so-called overhang mandates. However, so that as good as nothing changes in the distribution of proportional representation, the other parties receive a corresponding number of additional mandates, the so-called equalization mandates. This increases the total number of MPs, and the Bundestag is inflated. Only three overhang seats remain unbalanced after the recent reform of the electoral law - otherwise the Bundestag would be even bigger.
This would also have made the absurd situation conceivable that the CDU and CSU have more mandates than the SPD, although the SPD is the stronger force after second votes.
After all, that has not happened now, the SPD's lead over the Union in the second vote is now large enough.
But next time it could be different again - and the Bundestag will also be much bigger.
New mammoth task
In addition to the major reform tasks such as climate and pensions, the new Bundestag has another mammoth task: to reform itself in such a way that it is fair and that the Bundestag really becomes smaller.
Because of the blockade of the Christian Socials in the past legislative period, the SPD, Greens and FDP agreed in the run-up to the current election to tackle a reform of the new legislature, if necessary without the Union.
But that should not be easy for at least some of their MPs: namely the list candidates, who only got a chance because of this inflation.
In fact, they would have to decide on a reform with which they would not have received their mandate - and would probably lose again in the next election.
