Narrowest defeat of all time: The "wasted" votes in the federal election

Never before has a party missed out on entering the Bundestag as narrowly as the BSW did this year. Just a little over 13,000 more votes for Wagenknecht's party and the starting position for the election winner, the CDU, would have worsened drastically. Its leader Merz benefits from the threshold clause.

The composition of the next Bundestag will not be decided until very late on election night - and with it the fate of the next federal government. The Federal Election Commissioner adds the votes from the last three constituencies - Flensburg, Viersen and Mannheim - to the official list of results, but as expected, the West German cities are no longer able to turn things around. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance narrowly missed the five percent hurdle, more than any other party in the 76-year history of the Federal Republic of Germany. 2,468,670 people voted for the BSW, which corresponds to 4.972 percent. In the end, the BSW narrowly missed the five percent hurdle by exactly 13,435 votes.

The end of all Bundestag hopes for the FDP was more obvious. With 4.3 percent, the Liberals suffered the heaviest defeat in their party's history. Chairman Christian Lindner announced his departure from the party and politics on election night.

The narrow exit of BSW and FDP from the Bundestag, each with more than four percent, makes it clear that a particularly large number of second votes were "wasted" in this Bundestag election. In total, 13.8 percent of the votes went to parties below the decisive five percent hurdle. In other words: the second votes of around 13.7 percent of voters will not be represented in the next Bundestag.

Such a representation gap has only occurred once in the history of German elections. In the 2013 federal election, 15.7 percent of voters voted for parties below the five percent hurdle. The FDP failed even more narrowly than this year, with 4.8 percent, and the AfD received 4.7 percent in its first federal election. From then on, a particularly large "GroKo" faced a small opposition bloc made up of the Left and the Greens in parliament. Given the extremely clear majority, governing for the CDU/CSU and SPD was comparatively easy.

Barrier clause saves black-red

The five percent hurdle exists because Germany experienced the other extreme during the Weimar Republic: fragmented conditions, numerous small parties, unstable governments. This is why the threshold was introduced for the 1953 federal election. In the historically first federal election four years earlier, the threshold applied to each federal state individually. In the first election after reunification in 1990, the hurdle was set separately for West and East Germany.

The fact that the clause makes stable governments, as intended, significantly more likely is confirmed by the result of the current federal election. If the clause were four percent, as in the national elections in Austria, or three percent, as in the district elections in Berlin and Hamburg, the CDU/CSU and SPD would not be able to form a joint government. Instead, the designated next Federal Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, would have to include either the Greens or the FDP as an additional coalition partner.

In the hypothetical scenario of a three percent threshold, the Union would have 188 seats (-20). The AfD would send 137 MPs (-15) to parliament. The SPD would still have 108 (-12), the Greens 77 (-8) and the Left 58 (-6) seats in the Bundestag. The BSW would be represented by 33 (+33) and the FDP by 29 (+29) MPs. Thanks to the five percent hurdle and if the provisional official final result is confirmed, Merz will most likely be able to govern under less fragmented conditions.

Functioning of Parliament more important

From a democratic theory perspective, the five percent hurdle has been and continues to be viewed critically by some constitutional lawyers and politicians for decades. Karlsruhe has also already dealt with the threshold clause. In 1990, the Federal Constitutional Court expressly declared the hurdle to be constitutional. Karlsruhe ruled that the functionality of parliament was more important than the exact reflection of the will of the voters.

The key question is: how much reflection of the will of the voters are we prepared to give up in order to improve the functionality of the political system? There is no agreement among election researchers. Some are calling for the threshold to be lowered to four percent, others want to keep the current regulation. No one denies that the representative power of the Bundestag suffers under a threshold. Nevertheless, there is agreement in Germany that the regulation makes sense in principle. But there is disagreement about the level of the hurdle.

Meanwhile, the Federal Constitutional Court decided fundamentally differently in 2011. Karlsruhe declared the five percent hurdle in European elections to be incompatible with the Basic Law and thus void. The EU Parliament is structured differently and does not elect a government that is dependent on ongoing support like in German government coalitions, said the then President of the Court, Andreas Voßkuhle. The work of the Brussels Parliament is not disproportionately made more difficult by the entry of small parties.

Mini-success for animal protection party and satirist

The following calculation shows how large the representation gap is in the next German Bundestag: Based on the total number of around 60.5 million eligible voters in this Bundestag election, the MPs will in future represent 70.8 percent of the voting population. 42.8 million of the total 49.6 million votes went to parties that entered the Bundestag. The parties below the threshold, on the other hand, were voted for by around 6.8 million people. Some of the voters can at least console themselves with the fact that even below the five percent hurdle, the final results are not completely irrelevant.

Finally, there is also the 0.5 percent mark. Parties that receive at least 0.5 percent of the valid second votes in the federal election are entitled to state funding. The Free Voters (1.5 percent) and the Animal Protection Party (1.0 percent) were able to easily overcome this important hurdle. Volt (0.7 percent) and the satirical party "Die Partei" (0.5 percent) also made the jump. However, the satirists did not have a counting thriller like the BSW.