Election of Members of the German Bundestag

Since 1949, voters in the Federal Republic have elected the Members of the German Bundestag for a period of four years by secret ballot in general, direct and free elections based on the principle of equal voting rights. These principles are enshrined in Article 39 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, the country’s constitution.

It states that the Members of the Bundestag are “representatives of the whole people, not bound by orders or instructions and responsible only to their conscience”.

In principle, all Germans aged 18 and over on election day have the right to vote and stand as candidates in Bundestag elections.  

The first newly elected German Bundestag convened in Bonn on 7 September 1949. 
Ever since the second Bundestag election, held in 1953, each voter has cast two votes in Bundestag elections. The first vote is cast for a candidate in the voter’s constituency. There are 299 constituencies in Germany, with roughly 250,000 Germans living in each of them. The second vote is cast for a political party.

Prior to the election, the parties establish lists of candidates for each of Germany’s Länder (federal states), with the order of the candidates being determined at party conferences. If a Member of Parliament resigns as a parliamentarian, they are replaced by the next candidate on the Land list of the party for which they were elected to the Bundestag. If there are no more candidates available on the party list, the seat is left vacant.

The Bundestag is composed of 630 Members. The parties are represented on a proportional basis, in line with the share of the second votes they received. When allotting parliamentary seats to the parties, the first step is to determine how many seats each party is entitled to nationwide. The seats are then allocated to the Land lists established by each party. The constituency candidates who received the most first votes in their constituency are ranked from the highest percentage of first votes to the lowest, and are moved in this order to the top of the party list. The seats are awarded to the successful constituency candidates in this order.

If there are more successful constituency candidates than there are seats available – in other words, if not all successful candidates are covered by the results of the second votes – the constituency candidates with the weakest results are not given a seat; this is known as the second-vote coverage procedure (Zweitstimmendeckung). If a party is awarded more seats in a Land than it has successful constituency candidates, the remaining seats are allocated to candidates from the party list.

In principle, each party has to receive at least five per cent of the second votes nationwide in order to be represented in the Bundestag. If a party’s share of the second votes is below five per cent, it can nonetheless enter the Bundestag and receive the number of seats that reflects its share of the second votes if it has won at least three constituency seats. This principle is known as the Grundmandatsklausel, the clause on the minimum number of constituency seats required for party representation in Parliament.

The procedures for a Bundestag election are regulated by the Federal Electoral Code (Bundeswahlordnung). The Bundestag scrutinises the validity of the election based on the Act on the Scrutiny of Elections (Wahlprüfungsgesetz).