Germany to reduce bloated parliament after constitutional court ruling

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Germany’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday approved the government’s plan to cut the size of the Bundestag by around 100 lawmakers, but rejected parts of the proposed reforms to protect smaller parties.

With 733 members, the German Bundestag is the world’s largest elected second chamber, larger than the European Parliament (720) and countries with much larger populations, such as India (543).

Germany’s center-left coalition government passed a reform in March last year to reduce the size of parliament to 630 members. The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the reform is constitutional and will be implemented at the next election.

“This is also an important signal for the voters. There will be no more uncontrolled growth in the Bundestag,” said Bärbel Bas, the parliamentary chairman of Germany’s ruling Social Democrats.

“It creates planning security, limits costs and enhances the Bundestag’s ability to work.”

Germany’s complex electoral laws, which include both proportional representation and first-past-the-post systems, have led to a larger but increasingly divided parliament. The Bundestag has grown after every election since the last resize in 2002, from 603 members to its current record size.

Vested interests have long blocked sweeping reforms because several lawmakers from the center-right Christian Democratic Union, which governed for 16 years until 2021, would lose their seats if the party were to lose seats.

However, the new reforms are also being challenged in court as two smaller opposition parties – the progressive left party Left and the Bavaria regional party Christian Social Union, a sister party to the CDU – fear repercussions.

Their concerns are linked to the government’s attempt to abolish Germany’s electoral threshold exception: this exception once allowed parties with votes below the 5% threshold to gain representation if they could field three candidates in a constituency – an exception that benefited the Left Party in the last election in 2021.

Small gathering saved

The court on Tuesday sided with the opposition, keeping the exception in place for now.

This means that if the Left Party and the Christian Socialists achieve similar results as in 2021, their seat share will remain the same at the next election in 2025, while the total number of MPs will still be reduced to 630.

Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union favorite He, who will become prime minister in 2025, said in a statement that the government’s “attempt to eliminate competition through the electoral law has failed.”

(By Oliver Noyan/Editing by Zoran Radosavljevic)