According to calculations by election researcher Robert Vehrkamp, ​​the next Bundestag, which will be elected this Sunday, could have more than 900 members.

On the basis of the last ZDF “Politbarometer” before Thursday's election, the expert from the Bertelsmann Foundation calculated a range of 672 to 912 mandates.

In a medium scenario it comes to 810 MPs.

The Bundestag currently has 709 members, making it bigger than ever before.

The research group Wahlen recently determined the following polls for the “Politbarometer”: SPD 25 percent, CDU / CSU 23, Greens 16.5, FDP 11, AfD 10 and Left 6 percent.

The three scenarios differed solely in the different assumptions about the splitting of first and second votes, said Vehrkamp of the German Press Agency in Berlin.

This splitting behavior is very difficult to predict.

According to Vehrkamp, ​​the middle scenario with 810 MPs is by no means extreme.

According to his account, it assumes that almost half of those voters who vote for the FDP with the second vote give their first vote to the Union, and that at the same time, as usual, more than 80 percent of the Union voters do so with both votes.

In the 2013 federal election, 63 percent of all FDP voters split in favor of the Union.

Standard size with 598 members

The standard size of the Bundestag is 598 MPs - 299 MPs directly elected in the constituencies with the first vote and 299 MPs recruited via the state lists.

However, this number is increasing due to overhang and compensation mandates.

Surplus mandates arise when a party receives more direct mandates than it is entitled to based on the second vote result.

This was most recently the case with the CSU and CDU.

The parties are then allowed to keep these overhang mandates, but the other parties receive compensation mandates.

More than two thirds of Germans already consider the Bundestag, with its 709 members, to be too big.

In a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency, 71 percent said that there were too many members in parliament.

11 percent said they thought the number of seats was just right.

Only 3 percent thought the Bundestag had to be enlarged.