Germany’s election system is a scandal

Two million people won’t be represented by the candidate who won their local race.

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With so much happening in the world, you would think that German politicians would at least be able to agree on the fundamentals so that they can get on with dealing with issues like Russia, Trump, climate change and all the rest of it.

Instead, tinkering with the voting system has become an obsession of governments, an effort that wastes both the time of Bundestag lawmakers and - inevitably - the Constitutional Court, which is asked for its opinion every time the rules change.

It all started in 2012 with a bizarre decision by the Constitutional Court - Germany’s highest legal authority - to annul the system that had existed for over sixty years beforehand. The judges decided that the voting system wasn’t producing results that properly represented the will of the people and told the Bundestag to come up with a better one.

This decision was silly - there is nothing in the constitution that sets out how an election should be run beyond it being free, fair and the ballot being secret. Nonetheless, the country’s top judges were concerned that the parliament formed after the 2009 election was no longer “proportional” enough.

Since then, there have been three attempts to rectify the system - each one worse than the last.

Before we go any further: here’s a quick lesson in German electoral law. When you go to vote, you receive two lists and you vote twice rather than just once. The reason for this is that Germany tries to combine first-past-the-post with proportional representation. Your first vote goes to a direct candidate for your constituency, your second vote goes to a party and the votes are counted nationwide.

The first vote (in black) on the left; the second vote (in blue) on the right. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

There is something to be said for this system. It makes it easier for novel opinions to make their way into the national parliament.

There is a basic design flaw in the German system, though, that gives too much power to parties that have weak connections to local communities. The design flaw is this: although only the second vote follows proportional representation, the concept of proportionality applies to the Bundestag as a whole.

In other words, a party that wins 10 percent of the second vote gets 10 percent of the seats in the Bundestag, regardless of how many constituency seats they win.

Without putting too fine a point on it, this system is dumb. It encourages parties to put little to no effort into community-level campaigning as they know that it is a waste of time.

The Free Democrats, a small liberal party, have only won one constituency contest since the early 1950s. Put another way, they have a win-loss ratio of 1-4,500 - yet they regularly appear in the Bundestag with a healthily-sized faction. Between 2021 and 2025, they had 91 MdBs (Members of the Bundestag), putting them ahead of the AfD, Die Linke and CSU, all of whom won several constituencies.

Up until 2012, there was at least some advantage to be had in doing well in the first vote. Under the old system, if a party performed better in constituency races than they did in the second vote they were rewarded with a few “excess lawmakers.”

After the Constitutional Court ruling, though, the government was told to limit these “excess lawmakers.” The Merkel government’s response was to compensate the other parties by giving them “equaliser lawmakers.” The result was that the Bundestag ballooned from around 600 representatives to over 700.

That solution was seen as costly and ineffective, so the Scholz government had another go at reform. Its attempt was even worse. Due to the Scholz government containing two parties (the Greens and the Free Democrats) which profit from the second vote, it had an interest in loading the dice even further in favour of proportional representation.

The solution it came up with was to cap the number of seats in the Bundestag, while giving priority to the second vote. In effect, this meant that there was no longer enough space in the debating chamber for all of the constituency MdBs.

While the maths is complicated, this time around it resulted in 23 candidates winning their constituency but still not gaining a place in the new Bundestag. It means that two million people won’t be represented in the Bundestag by their winning constituency candidate.

Coincidentally or not, 18 of these constituency winner were candidates from the CDU and CSU, Meanwhile, most of the constituencies that missed out happen to be in the greater Frankfurt area, meaning that a whole region of the country isn’t properly represented in the next parliament.

But wait, it gets more absurd!

There has to be a system for deciding which constituency MdBs don’t find a seat when the music stops. The yardstick that the Scholz government decided to use was how much of the vote they had won. Constituency winners would be ranked by how many votes they won - and the ones with the lowest vote count would be the first to face the chop.

This doesn’t just fail to understand how first-past-the-post works, it is also a recipe for gerrymandering. Winning with 30 percent rather than 40 percent often reflects the strength of the opposition rather than the candidate’s weakness. Or, it is a result of the constituency containing a broad cross-section of society. It’s like deciding that a battleground state won’t count for the US election because the result was too close!

If this system isn’t discarded (as it deserves to be), politicians will be tempted to repeatedly redraw constituency lines to try to carve out ‘safe seats’ for their lawmakers.

In truth, the whole system needs to be abolished.

The latest reform only highlights the farce that permeates the system. The way to fix it is obvious. The first and second votes should be treated as entirely separate votes to the same chamber. Each should be allocated an equal number of seats. But the principle of proportionality should be strictly limited to the second vote.

In this system, a party that wins no constituencies but ten percent of the second vote would end up with five percent of the seats in the Bundestag. That would give power back to constituency MdBs and ensure that community representatives have a strong voice in the national assembly.

Not only would this system properly balance FPTP with proportional representation, it would give us more stable governments in which single-issue parties wouldn’t be the tail wagging the dog.

Applied to February’s election, it would give us the following result:

Share of seats in the Bundestag: my reform vs reality.

As you can see, under my system the CDU/CSU would be just 15 seats shy of a majority in the new Bundestag, meaning they could build a coalition with any of the other parties. That would enable the government to have a stronger agenda and would prevent the sort of bickering that is prevalent in multi-party coalitions.

To get really geeky, this system would even put an end to the “5 percent hurdle” - the rule that states that parties need at least 5 percent of the second vote in order to gain entry to the Bundestag. The Constitutional Court has ruled that the “5 percent hurdle” is unconstitutional but has said that it can remain in place until a better way is found of ensuring that the parliament doesn’t break down into lots of small factions.

Even without the “5 percent hurdle,” the reform I’m suggesting would ensure that the Bundestag would have a strong core of parties with broad national appeal. At most, a couple more niche groups would enter the mix who could be given some minor role in government should the need arise.

Europe needs a strong Germany - and the current system gives us a weak, indecisive Germany. The time is ripe for this reform!