The Bundestag is the unicameral parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is the supreme legislative body of the state. Parliament is formed on the basis of its election by German citizens, through universal free elections, for a period of 4 years.
Instruction manual
1
The FRG Constitution does not establish detailed rules on the electoral system. Currently, the election procedure for the Bundestag is regulated by the 1993 Federal Law on Elections. The right to elect parliamentarians is granted to German citizens who have lived in the state for at least three months and have reached the age of 18 years.
2
This suffrage is called active. Passive suffrage, that is, the right to be elected to parliament, is granted to citizens who have reached the age of 18, who have German citizenship for at least one year and are not deprived of active suffrage. There is no threshold for electoral turnout in Germany.
3
The German parliament consists of deputies elected on the basis of secret, general, free elections for a period of 4 years. Deputies have immunity, parliamentary indemnity and their powers cannot be prematurely terminated by recall of voters.
4
The election law establishes the total number of parliamentarians at 631. The elections themselves are held according to a mixed electoral system: half of the deputies are elected by constituency, the other half - by party lists (the so-called land list of parties).
5
In elections, each voter has two votes. One vote is cast for a candidate for deputy in the constituency, a second vote is cast for a land list of candidates for a particular party. In the constituency, the candidate with the most votes wins. Germany is divided into 299 single-member constituencies, thus filling half the seats of the Bundestag. The second half of the parliament is filled with candidates on the land lists of parties. Germany has 16 federal states, so each state is a multi-member constituency.
6
To determine the number of mandates obtained from party lists, the Heire-Niemeyer counting system is used: all the "second votes" given for the party list of a particular party are summed and multiplied by the total number of mandates distributed. Then the resulting number is divided by the total number of "second votes" cast for all party lists. Thus, the proportion of seats of each party in parliament is calculated. The distribution of mandates involves only those parties that, at the national level, have collected at least 5 percent of the vote.
