Direct Mandate

In Germany, a direktmandat ( ''English'': direct mandate) is a parliamentary seat that is won by the candidate who receives the most votes in a constituency in a legislative election. In the mixed-member proportional representation system used in Germany, a political party receives mandates on the state list for the number of seats it wins in the constituencies, so that direct mandates generally have no influence on the number of seats the parties have in parliament. In contrast, in a majority voting system such as in the United Kingdom or the United States, the number of seats the parties have depends exclusively on their success in the constituencies.

Germany

Bundestag

Under the federal election law, 299 members of the German Bundestag are elected directly in their Bundestag constituency. At least another 299 (299 plus any compensatory mandates for levelling purposes) are elected via their party's electoral list ( list candidate). The first vote and the second vote can be cast independently of each other. In the election to the German Bundestag, the direct mandates are awarded by the first votes in accordance with the .

According to the Bundestag electoral system, candidates from political parties and possibly independent candidates as individuals, compete against each other in each constituency. Election results are calculated according to plurality voting, i.e. the candidate with the most votes is elected as a ''constituency representative''.

Until 2023, if a political party was able to win at least three direct mandates, it automatically received extra seats according to its share of second votes even if it had won less than the five percent electoral threshold of the second votes (). This was last the case in 2021, when The Left Party was able to win three direct mandates but only 4.9% of the second votes. In the 1953 West German federal election, one basic mandate was enough, which was the last time the German Centre Party was represented in the Bundestag. The total number of mandates a party receives is determined by its share of the second votes. The direct mandates are deducted from the mandates to which it is entitled based on this share, and the remainder are filled with candidates from the list.

If a party has more direct mandates than it is entitled to based on second votes, overhang mandates arise. Since compensatory mandates have been in place since 2013, overhangs do increase the size of the Bundestag for a party, but until 2020 they no longer brought it a systematic advantage through a higher share of mandates. Since 2020, up to three overhang mandates were not compensated. If a member of parliament who holds such an uncompensated overhang mandate leaves the Bundestag, unlike in other cases, no list candidate takes their place. This was the case when Stefan Müller and Andreas Scheuer (both CSU) resigned in 2024.

After changes adopted in 2023, overhang mandates will generally no longer arise, which is achieved by not awarding direct mandates if a party has received too few primary votes in a state. The awarding of direct mandates to the runner-up was rejected by the coalition parties as a "difficult to explain violation of an at least intuitively plausible concept of justice". Such a regulation is provided for, for example, in the if a party receives less than 5% of the votes and therefore does not receive any mandates.

If an individual candidate wins the relative majority in a constituency, he or she will definitely receive the direct mandate (see currentl
Section 6
Paragraph 2 in conjunction wit

Paragraph 3 of the Federal Election Act). However, this has only occurred in the initial Bundestag election of 1949. Before the election law amendment of 2023, this also applied to candidates of a party that had received neither more than 5% of the second votes nor the basic mandates, which meant that after the 2002 German federal election, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) was represented in the Bundestag with two MPs.

State elections

The members of most state parliaments are partly elected directly in their constituency and partly via their party's electoral list (a candidate may only stand in one constituency). Only in Hamburg, Bremen and Saarland are there no single-member constituencies. The proportion of direct mandates in the total number of seats varies between the different federal states. In principle, the procedure for allocating seats is similar. There are compensatory mandates everywhere for overhang mandates. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, the number of compensatory mandates is limited, so that unbalanced overhang mandates can arise.

There are no electoral lists in the election to the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. Here, direct mandates, which are called first mandates in Baden-Württemberg, are awarded to the winners of the respective constituencies and second mandates to the defeated constituency candidates with the highest share of the vote.

See also

* State list (Germany)
{{Wikitionary, Direktmandat

References

Bundestag
Politics of Germany
Political terminology in Germany
Proportional representation electoral systems
German voting rights