Ten thousand votes missing: Can the BSW still get over the five percent hurdle?

The BSW missed out on a place in the Bundestag by 0.028 percentage points. Hope still seems to be burning in the party. But where will the missing votes come from? Party founder Wagenknecht raises accusations against the election process and polling institutes.

The Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) alliance missed out on a place in the Bundestag by the margin of a small town. Almost two and a half million votes earned the party 4.972 percent. Not enough for the Bundestag. 0.028 percentage points or 13,435 votes too few. A small town too few.

It is understandable that the BSW is not satisfied with this result. For the first time, a party would have managed to clear the five percent hurdle at the first attempt. On election night, Fabio De Masi wrote on X: "I fear that this election will still keep Karlsruhe busy." De Masi's accusation: Many of the approximately 230,000 registered Germans living abroad were prevented from voting. De Masi's calculation: The votes missing for the BSW correspond to around six percent of this group.

Party founder Sahra Wagenknecht made the same point at the federal press conference that morning: If Germans living abroad had been elected across the board, it would have been entirely possible to obtain the missing votes. "That cannot be dismissed," said Wagenknecht. The question arises as to the legal validity of the result.

BSW would need at least eleven percent abroad

In fact, the Foreign Office reported last week that only 9,000 voting documents had arrived from abroad by Thursday evening . The number is unlikely to have increased significantly by Sunday either: The Foreign Office said that around 11,200 voting documents had been received by courier on the evening before the election and had been handed over to Deutsche Post as planned.

But it is questionable whether the votes of Germans living abroad can lift the BSW over the five percent hurdle. Wagenknecht and De Masi are making it too easy for themselves: six percent of the votes of Germans living abroad really correspond to the 13,435 votes that the BSW is missing. But the BSW would have to win these votes in addition to the almost five percent that the BSW already achieved in the federal election.

This means that if not a single vote from abroad had arrived in time, the BSW would need a result of at least eleven percent. The more German votes from abroad have already been counted, the better the BSW would have to do among the remaining ones in order to get over five percent.

"There is no right to vote by mail"

All these calculations are irrelevant anyway, if you trust Sophie Schönberger's assessment. She is a party law expert at the University of Düsseldorf and, when asked by ntv.de, explains that Germans living abroad have no right to vote by mail: they have the option of voting at the polling station - like everyone else. The legal conditions are the same for all voters. "The reasons why voting is more convenient for some and less convenient for others are circumstances that the voters themselves have created," says Schönberger.

Therefore, the complications in the election of Germans living abroad are "not objectionable from a constitutional point of view," says Schönberger. However, she sees a "need for legal action." Constitutional lawyer Joachim Wieland also believes that the treatment of Germans living abroad is a "nuisance in terms of democratic theory that cries out for reform." However, he sees no basis for the Constitutional Court to intervene, he tells ntv.de.

The official final result also gives the BSW little reason for hope: the difference between the provisional and final result in the 2021 federal election was not more than 5,000 votes for any party, while in 2017 it was a maximum of 3,000 votes - and that only for larger parties.

Wagenknecht criticizes "targeted action" by polling institute

Bundestag or not: her alliance achieved the best result of any party in its first election, said Wagenknecht. The BSW received more votes than in the European elections and brought many non-voters to the polls. Against the resistance of the media and polling institutes - that's how Wagenknecht sees it: "There was a negative media campaign against our party that I have never experienced before," she said at the federal press conference. BSW content was blocked, the party's prospects for success were "systematically written down" .

In Wagenknecht's eyes, the Forsa polling institute, which compiles the RTL/ntv trend barometer, is at least partly to blame. Two days before the election, Forsa still had the BSW at three percent. "That goes far beyond the margin of error," complained Wagenknecht. The Forsa figures do not represent a forecast, but "a targeted action," said Wagenknecht. It is "probable" that Forsa prevented the BSW from entering the Bundestag.

Forsa managing director Peter Matuschek calls the accusation "completely absurd". His institute has always pointed out "that election polls are subject to uncertainty, that polls only ever reflect an opinion at the time of the survey and are not predictions of the election outcome". This is also how the media reported on Forsa's surveys.

BSW's outcry could help Germans living abroad

Political scientist Thorsten Faas also sees Wagenknecht's accusation as exaggerated: Studies show no clear effects of polls - bad forecasts can also give parties a boost, he told the Phoenix broadcaster. However , an ntv.de overview shows that the forecasts were by and large close to the final result anyway.

The outcry from the BSW is unlikely to help the BSW much. However, it could benefit Germans living abroad - at least in the long term. Thanks to the BSW, the issue will remain on the agenda. Many people will turn to the Bundestag's Election Review Committee and lodge an objection. The complaints will probably not lead to the election being declared invalid.

But: The committee writes on its website that it repeatedly encounters problems in its work "that do not constitute electoral errors, but from which improvements can be derived." These problems are then passed on to the federal government as a so-called "request for review."