Top German court finds part of electoral reform bill incompatible with constitution

There has long been cross-party agreement that the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, is far too big. With the last general election in 2021, it had ballooned to 736 members, making it larger than any other democratically elected parliament in the world — and very expensive. In March 2023, the three ruling parties — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — together passed a new electoral law aiming to limit the size of Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, to 630 seats.  The opposition center-right Christian Democrat Union (CSU), the Left Party and others took the new law to the Federal Constitutional Court. They feared for their seats in parliament.  The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, essentially approved the electoral law reform which several previous governments had failed to achieve. Partly because the German electoral system is so complicated. The fact that the Bundestag is becoming smaller has now been approved. "The Federal Constitutional Court has saved this law, has made it watertight to a certain extent," political scientist Albrecht von Lucke told DW after the verdict was published. However, the court overturned one of the points of this electoral law reform. "The 5% clause in its current form is not compatible with the Basic Law," it wrote, referring to the threshold a party needs to cross to secure representation in the Bundestag. In Germany, the "five percent clause" generally applies to federal and state elections. This hurdle is intended to ensure that not too many small and splinter parties enter the parliaments. 
Read the full article here: DW