The first sentence should say it all.

"The German Bundestag consists of 598 members of parliament." If the plans of the traffic lights go according to the plans of the traffic light, the federal election law should start like this in the future.

Even now, the number 598 is in the law, but supplemented by the addition "subject to the deviations resulting from this law".

These deviations have recently been considerable, currently there are 137 more MPs.

The Bundestag is the largest freely elected national parliament in the world.

Helen Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Eckhart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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Bloating has been an issue for years.

In 2013, the then President of Parliament Norbert Lammert from the CDU called on MPs to reform the electoral law.

The previous year, the Federal Constitutional Court had ruled that overhang mandates – i.e. mandates achieved because a party wins more direct mandates through first votes than it is entitled to based on the result of the second vote – may not be allocated indefinitely without compensation.

Since then, there have been compensation mandates.

If some polls before the 2021 election had come true, the Bundestag would have had more than 800 parliamentarians.

Ampel struggles through to a new approach

That costs a lot of money: the allowances, the salaries of the employees, the construction of more and more office space.

The working methods of the Bundestag are also reaching their limits, the committees can be of a size that makes intensive deliberations more difficult.

Even more important: the acceptance of parliamentary work suffers when the Bundestag proves unable to limit the number of its members to a reasonable size.

Especially in the years of the pandemic and the war, advocates of reform fear the message that the entire population should restrict itself, just not politicians.

Most of the reform attempts of the past few years have failed.

In 2020, as a minimum compromise, it was decided to moderately reduce the number of constituencies from the 2025 election onwards.

In the future, however, there would still be around 650 members of parliament in the Bundestag.

The traffic light has come up with a new approach: Overhang mandates should no longer be allocated, which is why there is no need for compensation mandates.

This means that the size of 598 MPs remains.

According to the draft law, which was passed by the traffic light parliamentary groups on Tuesday and is then to go quickly to a first reading in the Bundestag, there will no longer be a first and second vote, but a main vote and a constituency vote.

The main vote, like the second vote, decides on the proportional distribution of seats to the parties.

With the constituency vote, a direct candidate is elected in the constituency.

The CSU in particular could lose many direct mandates

Unlike before, however, there is no longer any guarantee that the candidate who gets the most votes in a constituency will be elected to the Bundestag.

According to the traffic light bill, a further requirement is the so-called main vote coverage: This means that no more constituency winners may enter the Bundestag than a party is entitled to based on the result of the main votes.

If there are more, the constituencies are allocated in the order of the first vote result.

This means that anyone who wins in the constituency but has a worse result than their party friends in other constituencies may not get a seat in the Bundestag.

Using Bavaria as an example, you have to imagine this as follows: If, as in the 2021 federal election, CSU candidates win in 45 of 46 Bavarian constituencies next time and if the CSU wins the main vote again with 31.7 percent, there will be eleven more constituency winners , than the party is entitled to based on the results of the main votes.

These are the eleven overhang mandates that were assigned to the CSU in 2021.

In the future, this would mean that there would be no direct candidates in eleven constituencies, so that, assuming these results, there would only be 34 CSU deputies in the Bundestag.

Those with the relatively poorest first vote results would not move in, that would tend to be the candidates from the larger cities.