Every day, the correspondents’ club describes how the same current event is illustrated in two countries.
The club of correspondents looks Wednesday, April 5 on the reduction of the number of deputies in Germany and Italy.
In Germany, simplify the voting system
In Germany, the Bundestag has decided to drastically reduce the number of its deputies, which will drop from 736 currently to 630 seats in the next legislature from 2025. Indeed, the complex German voting system has the particularity that it does not determine not set a fixed number of Members in advance. The number changes from year to year, and lately, it has tended to increase with each election: projections anticipated more than 800 deputies in 2025, if no reform was undertaken. Reducing the number of deputies by 106 seats also means thousands of parliamentary attaché posts will be eliminated. According to the calculations of the taxpayers’ federation, the reform will save at least 340 million euros per legislature.
Concretely, during the legislative elections, a voter has two votes: with the first, he votes for a candidate in his constituency and with the second, he votes for a party. Until now, the candidate who came first in one of the constituencies was directly elected, this will no longer be the case automatically from now on. The candidate’s party must have obtained at least 5% of the votes in the second vote for this candidate to be able to enter the Bundestag. It may therefore happen that candidates, first in their constituency, do not ultimately become MPs.
But the reform, adopted with a large majority of 399 votes in favor against 261 against and 23 abstentions, is highly criticized by the most modest parties, which were saved by the current rule, such as Die Linke, the left-wing party. Very established in the east, Die Linke obtained more than 12% of the votes in Mecklenburg-Pomerania or Thuringia but barely 3% in Baden-Württemberg or Bavaria. National average: 4.9%, therefore below 5%. With the new rule, die Linke would therefore have no deputy in the Bundestag, whereas the party currently has 39 seats. Same thing for the CSU, the Bavarian branch of the conservative CDU party, which is around 5%, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. The two parties have also declared their intention to have the Constitutional Court invalidate this reform, which “despises voters and democracy”.
In Italy, a reform already in place
In Italy, the reduction has already been made, after a reform in 2020 which reduced the size of the Italian Parliament by a third with the new legislature in autumn 2022. Italian deputies have therefore fallen from 630 to 400 seats and the 315 senators are down to 200. Each senator now represents more than 150,000 Italians, the highest figure in Europe.
A reform launched by the populist government and which appeals to the Italians, because they were the ones who had the last word with a referendum, approved by more than two thirds of the voters. But also a reform which was supposed to save 60 million euros per year in Italy: in fact, the budgets of the two assemblies still weigh just as heavily. And so much the better according to some, because their work as parliamentarians has not been reduced by a third.
But the far right does not intend to stop there, because Giorgia Meloni speaks of presidentialism: she would like to transform the Italian parliamentary regime into a presidential or semi-presidential regime, as in France. A big change for the Italians, accustomed to the figure of a President of the Republic – today Sergio Mattarella – not politicized because guarantor of the institutions.