Following the German federal elections held on 23 February 2025, 23 directly elected constituency winners were not granted parliamentary seats, despite having received the majority of first votes in their constituencies. This situation arose because of the 2023 electoral law reform, which links the allocation of constituency seats to a party’s overall share of second votes, thus causing intra-party competition among successful constituency candidates and excluding those with relatively lower national weight. Such a system has led to unequal representation among voters, the effective nullification of first votes in certain constituencies, and a perceived erosion of electoral fairness and public trust. The vast majority of excluded constituency winners belonged to opposition parties, raising further concerns about political pluralism and the balance of democratic institutions.
The Parliamentary Assembly has always been committed to democratic standards, electoral fairness, and political representation as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ETS No. 5) and guided by the work of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) in its work. Therefore, it should open a debate on the compatibility of the current German electoral framework with Council of Europe democratic standards, invite the Venice Commission to provide an urgent opinion on the proportionality, fairness, and representative legitimacy of the mechanisms introduced by the 2023 reform, call on the German authorities to consider appropriate amendments to the electoral law to ensure that every winning constituency candidate is duly represented in parliament and invite the German authorities to revise the electoral legislation to avoid the recurrence of the above situation.