Berliners went to the polls yesterday to redo an election first held in September 2021.
Berliners went to the polls yesterday to redo an election first held in September 2021. The German capital city is one of three city-states (along with Bremen and Hamburg) that elects its own legislature. Berlin’s Abgeordnetenhaus currently has 147 seats. After the 2021 election, the three left-wing parties — the SPD, the Greens, and The Left — formed a coalition government. The SPD was the largest party, with 36 seats, followed by the Greens with 32, and the right-wing CDU, in opposition, with 30.
The Abgeordnetenhaus is similar to the type of system that critics of the U.S. two-party system want to emulate. Seventy-eight seats are elected from districts, and the remainder are allocated proportionally according to the total popular vote. The total number of seats can fluctuate based on the results, with a minimum of 130 total seats. There’s a 5 percent threshold parties must cross to earn any seats. After 2021, six parties were above that threshold: In addition to the four parties already mentioned, AfD and the FDP join the CDU in the opposition.
That 2021 election was a disaster. From DW:
Authorities in the German capital have been under extra scrutiny since last November, when the state’s Constitutional Court annulled the state and municipal elections held on September 26, 2021, and handed down a damning verdict on a badly mishandled election day: Delays forced people to stand in line for many hours, as some ballot stations ran out of ballot papers and hastily photocopied more, other ballots had the wrong candidates listed on them, some stations had to close temporarily, while others remained open longer than they should have — making it possible to vote even after first results had been published. Meanwhile, the Berlin Marathon — held on the same day — hampered attempts to resupply them.
Altogether, the court concluded, votes for around 60% of the seats in Berlin’s state parliament were affected by the problems. Although no wrongdoing was alleged, it was, as many politicians have admitted since, deeply embarrassing. Never before has an election in Germany been botched so badly that it would have to be repeated.
The results from yesterday were a sharp reversal from the 2021 results. The CDU was by far the highest vote-getter, earning 28.2 percent of the votes, up from only 18 percent in 2021. The SPD performed worse than it ever has in post-war Berlin. It usually dominates the progressive city-state’s politics, holding the mayoralty for the past 22 consecutive years, but only got 18.4 percent of the vote, tied with the Greens. The CDU is projected to get 52 seats, and the SPD and Greens will only have 34 each.
So, clearly, the CDU will be in the government, right? Wrong. It’s possible that despite being by far the largest party and riding a wave of support from voters, the CDU will remain in the opposition.
The FDP, the CDU’s current partner in the opposition, got 4.6 percent of the vote, barely dropping below the 5 percent threshold and therefore earning zero seats. Without any help from the FDP, the CDU will have to join with either the Greens or the SPD if it wants to form a government. (It’s CDU policy to never form a government with AfD, given the latter party’s far-right views, and The Left disqualifies itself by being a successor to the former East German Communist party.)
The current SPD-Green-Left coalition — which, remember, was the result of an election that was annulled by the courts — still has a majority of the seats in the Abgeordnetenhaus. In fact, it’s possible that the only change in the government will be that the Green leader will become mayor, replacing the current SPD mayor, if the Greens squeak out more votes than the SPD, despite the fact that the Greens’ share of the vote declined by half a percentage point compared to 2021.
The issues in Berlin sound similar to those of big cities in the U.S. “High rents, dilapidated school buildings and outdated public transport were also among Berliners’ top election complaints,” DW reported. “Berlin is a city of homelessness and child poverty, and I want Berlin to become a city where everyone finds their place,” said CDU leader Kai Wegner.
Voters responded well to that message and made Wegner’s CDU the largest party by far, but the multi-party, proportional-representation system in Berlin leaves the decision of who governs in the hands of politicians, not the voters. Negotiations between party leaders will play out over the coming weeks to decide which coalition will be formed. It’s one way to run a country, and Germany makes it work, but it doesn’t exactly sound more democratic than the U.S.