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View of the plenary hall, where a chair will soon have to be removed

Photo: Jörg Carstensen/dpa

The partial repetition of the federal election in Berlin leads to a reduction in the size of parliament by one seat - at the expense of the FDP. The Liberals only have 91 MPs left. This means that the Bundestag will shrink to 735 members, as the Federal Returning Officer announced on Monday night. The number of seats for the other parties remains unchanged, but there are also shifts here.

The reason for this is the low voter turnout on Sunday at 51 percent. This results in a total participation in the capital of 69.5 percent (2021: 75.2 percent), meaning that the state of Berlin will lose four mandates and will only be represented by 25 politicians in the Bundestag in the future. One mandate expires, three are reassigned, namely to the SPD politician Angela Hohmann from Lower Saxony, Franziska Krumwiede-Steiner from the Greens from North Rhine-Westphalia and Christine Buchholz from the Left in Hesse.

The Berlin Green Party state chairwoman Nina Stahr, Berlin's FDP general secretary Lars Lindemann, the SPD MP Ana-Maria Trasnea and the left-wing parliamentarian Pascal Meiser are no longer in parliament. In contrast, all candidates who were ahead in the first votes in 2021 were able to defend their direct mandate.

It was already foreseeable before the election that things could be tight for those at the bottom of the respective state lists, who were enough to get into the Bundestag in 2021, in the partial repeat of the election on Sunday. It was still enough for the Green MP Andreas Audretsch in fourth place on the list, whose return was also considered uncertain - but no longer enough for Stahr in fifth place. In the SPD, Trasnea was also left behind in sixth place on the list due to the lower voter turnout and the SPD election results.

However, two other Berlin MPs, whose return to the Bundestag via the state list was also not considered certain, have made it: The general secretary of the state CDU, Ottilie Klein, is still represented in parliament, as is the AfD MP Götz Frömming.

Clear trends in the result

This does not change the majority in parliament. The percentage changes are nevertheless a pointer: Things went up in Berlin for the opposition parties CDU and AfD, while things went down for the traffic light parties SPD and FDP - and the Greens were able to almost maintain their Berlin result. Read here what five lessons can be learned from the mini federal election.

According to the result in the capital, the SPD remains the strongest party there with 22.2 percent (-1.2 percentage points), closely followed by the Greens with 22.0 percent (-0.3). The CDU improved to 17.2 percent (+1.3). The AfD climbed to 9.4 percent (+1.0) and pushed past the FDP, which fell to 8.1 percent (-0.9). With 11.5 percent, the Left practically maintained its result from the 2021 election (+0.1).

The overall nationwide percentage result for 2021 only changed minimally: the FDP (11.4 percent) and the Greens (14.7 percent) each lost 0.1 percentage points. The CDU (19.0 percent) and AfD (10.4 percent) each received 0.1 percentage points more. For the SPD (25.7 percent) and the Left (4.9 percent), the federal result from 2021 did not change in the election on Sunday.

The re-election was caused by many organizational problems and mishaps during the 2021 vote in Berlin. According to a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, new elections had to be held in 455 of the 2,256 electoral districts. Almost 550,000 Berliners were called upon to take part.

mgo/dpa