Electoral reform: Markus Söder wants to fight traffic lights

Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) has announced that his state will "definitely" sue against the new electoral law planned by the traffic light coalition before the Federal Constitutional Court. Speaking to journalists in Berlin on Thursday, Söder said the planned electoral reform was "of course" unconstitutional. Söder, who is also CSU chairman, was convinced that a lawsuit has a great chance of success.

Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

• Follow I follow

Söder said the CSU was "not panicking, but outraged." On the question of whether he could imagine a merger of the candidate lists of CDU and CSU, which would rule out that the CSU no longer moves into the Bundestag, Söder could not be quoted. However, there can be no doubt that the CSU not only considers such an approach to be legally impossible, but above all categorically excludes it politically.

A Bundestag without CSU deputies?

The traffic light coalition wants to decide on Friday in the Bundestag a new electoral law, which makes the previous second vote the decisive criterion for the allocation of mandates and according to which winning a constituency no longer automatically leads to the winner receiving a mandate. For the CSU, the planned abolition of the basic mandate clause is particularly problematic. So far, this regulates that the achievement of at least three direct mandates ensures the entry of a party into the Bundestag in group strength.

According to the new law, a party that receives less than five percent of the vote in total does not receive a mandate in the Bundestag. Although the CSU had achieved more than 40 direct mandates in the recent Bundestag election, there could be no doubt about entering the Bundestag in 2021. But their second vote result achieved in Bavaria was only 5.2 percent for the federal government. Should it slip below the five percent mark in the 2025 election, the CSU would be without members in the Bundestag – even if its candidates continued to receive the most constituency votes in the vast majority of Bavarian constituencies.

A merger of the election lists of the CDU and CSU would prevent this, because both parties together tend to cut far above the five-percent limit. But that would mean that the CSU would extend its election campaign far beyond Bavaria. This would also raise the question, which has been debated from time to time in the past, whether the CDU should not extend its sphere of activity to Bavaria and the CSU to the whole of Germany.

"A targeted, party-politically motivated intervention"

This is likely to have a considerable influence on the question of who will be the Union's candidate for chancellor. Last but not least, the dispute over it had led to the defeat of the Union and the election victory of the SPD before the 2021 election.

Söder directed to the traffic lights the "urgent appeal" to reconsider their project on the right to vote. Should it be decided as now planned by the traffic lights, it could happen in Söder's opinion that after each legislative period, the electoral law would be changed.

The Bavarian Prime Minister said the plans for the traffic light were a "one-time process". For the first time, "a political majority is cobbling together a new majority." This has never happened before. "This is a targeted, party-politically motivated intervention in the German election process." He had the impression that the traffic light wanted to secure its own majorities and silence critical spirits.