Bundestag

Related Topics:
Bundestag_1998 :: Bundestag_2002 :: Bundestag_2005

The Bundestag ("Federal Diet") is the parliament of Germany. It was established with Germany's constitution of 1949 (the Grundgesetz), and is the successor of the earlier Reichstag. The current Bundestag President is Norbert Lammert.

History

The Bundestag was also the nickname of the governing body of the German Confederation from 1815-1866 (officially called Bundesversammlung, "Federal Assembly"). This body met in Frankfurt and was presided over by the Austrian delegate. As one of the chief instruments of the reactionary forces opposed to democracy and nationalism, it was dissolved during the liberal revolution of 1848 but reconvened in 1850. It is a predecessor to the modern Bundestag in name only. While the modern parliament is elected by the people, the Bundestag of the German Confederation was appointed by the various princes and the governments of the free cities.

With the dissolution of the German Confederation in 1866 and the founding of the German Empire (Deutsches Reich) in 1871, the Reichstag was established as the German parliament in Berlin, and the current parliament building was erected. The Reichstag delegates were elected by direct and equal male suffrage (and not the three-class electoral system prevailing in Prussia until 1918). The Reichstag did not participate in the appointment of the Chancellor until the parliamentary reforms of October 1918. After the Revolution of November 1918 and the establishment of the Weimar Constitution, women were given the right to vote for (and serve in) the Reichstag, and the parliament could use the no-confidence vote to force the chancellor or any cabinet member to resign. In March 1933, one month after the Reichstag fire, parliament ceded its powers to the Federal Government of Chancellor Adolf Hitler by passing the infamous Enabling Act. Afterward it met only rarely to unanimously rubber-stamp the decisions of the government. It was last convened on 26 April 1942.

With the new constitution of 1949, the Bundestag was established as the new (West) German parliament. Because West Berlin was not officially under the jurisdiction of the Constitution and because of the Cold War, the Bundestag met in Bonn in several different buildings, including (provisionally) a former water works facility. The former Reichstag building housed a history exhibition ("Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte") and served occasionally as a conference center.

Since 1999, the German parliament has again assembled in Berlin in its original Reichstag building, which dates from the 1870's and underwent a significant renovation under the lead of British architect Norman Foster.

In 2005, a small airplane crashed close to the German parliament. It was then decided to ban private air traffic over Central Berlin.

Tasks

Together with the Bundesrat, the Bundestag forms the legislative branch of the German political system; however, Germany does not have a bicameral parliament in the strict sense (see Bundesrat for details).

Although most legislation is initiated by the executive branch, the Bundestag considers the legislative function its most important responsibility, concentrating much of its energy on assessing and amending the government's legislative program. The committees (see below) play a prominent role in this process. Plenary sessions provide a forum for members to engage in public debate on legislative issues before them, but they tend to be well attended only when significant legislation is being considered.

The Bundestag members are the only federal officials directly elected by the public; the Bundestag in turn elects the Chancellor and, in addition, exercises oversight of the executive branch on issues of both substantive policy and routine administration. This check on executive power can be employed through binding legislation, public debates on government policy, investigations, and direct questioning of the chancellor or cabinet officials. For example, the Bundestag can conduct a question hour (Fragestunde), in which a government representative responds to a previously submitted written question from a member. Members can ask related questions during the question hour. The questions can concern anything from a major policy issue to a specific constituent's problem. Use of the question hour has increased markedly over the past forty years, with more than 20,000 questions being posed during the 1987-90 term. Understandably, the opposition parties are active in exercising the parliamentary right to scrutinize government actions.

One striking difference when comparing the Bundestag with the U.S. Congress is the lack of time spent on serving constituents in Germany. In part, that difference results from the fact that only 50 percent of Bundestag deputies are directly elected to represent a specific geographic district; the other half are elected as party representatives (see below). The political parties are thus of great importance in Germany's electoral system, and many voters tend not to see the candidates as autonomous political personalities but rather as agents of the party. Interestingly, constituent service seems not to be perceived, either by the electorate or by the representatives, as a critical function of the legislator. A practical constraint on the expansion of constituent service is the limited personal staff of Bundestag deputies.

Constituent service does, however, take place in the form of the Petition Committee, rather than through individual delegates. In 2004, the Petition Committee received over 18,000 complaints from citizens and was able to negotiate a mutually satisfactory solution to more than half of them.

Election

Members serve four-year terms; elections are held every four years, or earlier in the relatively rare case that the Bundestag is being dissolved prematurely by the President on the recommendation of the Chancellor, which has happened three times as of 2005: 1972 under chancellor Willy Brandt, 1982 under chancellor Helmut Kohl and 2005 under chancellor Gerhard Schröder. All candidates must be at least eighteen years old; there are no term limits. The election uses the MMP electoral system, a hybrid of the first-past-the-post election system and party-list proportional representation. In addition, the Bundestag has a minimum threshold of either 5% of the national party vote or three (directly elected) constituency representatives for a party to gain additional representation through the system of proportional representation; thus, small (and often extremist) minority parties cannot so easily prevent the formation of stable majority governments as they could under the Weimar constitution. The additional member system results in a varying number of seats; since the 2002 elections, there have been 603 seats. The distribution of the seats is calculated by the Largest remainder method. The additional seats are distributed to ensure that the combined total of direct and additional seats is proportional to the vote; this is calculated separately for each state . Sometimes parties win more seats directly than what their proportional share would entitle them to - these are known as overhang seats. Unlike the situation in some German state parliaments, overhang seats are not compensated in the Bundestag.

Election result

Seats by party (16th Bundestag, since general election on September 18th, 2005)

+	CDU and CSU:	226	(36.8%)	including 7 overhang seats
+	SPD:	222	(36.2%)	including 9 overhang seats
+	FDP:	61	(9.9%)
+	Left Party:	54	(8.8%)
+	Alliance '90/Greens:	51	(8.3%)

For a list of current members, see the List of Bundestag Members.

List of Bundestage by Session

Historic seat distribution in the German Bundestag

	Session	Seats	CDU/CSU	SPD	FDP	Alliance '90 / The Greens¹	Left Party²	German Party	Others
Historic seat distribution in the German Bundestag (at the beginning of each session)
1st	1949 – 1953	402	139	131	52	–	–	17	Bavarian Party 17, Communist Party of Germany 15, Economic Development Coalition (WAV) 12, German Centre Party 10, DKP-DRP 5, South Schleswig Voter Federation 1, Independent 3
2nd	1953 – 1957	487	243	151	48	–	–	15	All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights (GB-BHE) 27, German Centre Party 3
3rd	1957 – 1961	497	270	169	41	–	–	17	–
4th	1961 – 1965	499	242	190	67	–	–	–	–
5th	1965 – 1969	496	245	202	49	–	–	–	–
6th	1969 – 1972	496	242	224	30	–	–	–	–
7th	1972 – 1976	496	225	230	41	–	–	–	–
8th	1976 – 1980	496	243	214	39	–	–	–	–
9th	1980 – 1983	497	226	218	53	–	–	–	–
10th	1983 – 1987	498	244	193	34	27	–	–	–
11th	1987 – 1990	497	223	186	46	42	–	–	–
12th	1990 – 1994	662	319	239	79	8	17	–	–
13th	1994 – 1998	672	294	252	47	49	30	–	–
14th	1998 – 2002	669	245	298	43	47	36	–	–
15th	2002 – 2005	603	248	251	47	55	2	–	–
16th	since 2005	614	226	222	61	51	54	–	–

¹: 1983 to 1990 The Greens, 1990 to 1994 Alliance 90, since 1994 Alliance 90/The Greens
²: 1990 to 2005 PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), since 2005 The Left Party

For detailed information on particular sessions of the Bundestag, please refer to the List of German Bundestage.

Presidents since 1949

Erich Köhler (CDU)	1949-1950	(resigned for medical reasons)
Hermann Ehlers (CDU)	1950-1954	(died in office)
Eugen Gerstenmaier (CDU)	1954-1969	(resigned for political reasons)
Kai-Uwe von Hassel (CDU)	1969-1972
Annemarie Renger (SPD)	1972-1976	(first woman and social democrat to hold the post)
Karl Carstens (CDU)	1976-1979	(resigned when he became President of Germany)
Richard Stücklen (CSU)	1979-1983
Rainer Barzel (CDU)	1983-1984	(resigned for political reasons)
Philipp Jenninger (CDU)	1984-1988	(resigned for political reasons)
Rita Süssmuth (CDU)	1988-1998
Wolfgang Thierse (SPD)	1998-2005
Norbert Lammert (CDU)	2005-

Organization

The most important organizational structures within the Bundestag are parliamentary groups (Fraktionen; sing. Fraktion), which are formed by political parties represented in the chamber which have gained more than 5% of the total votes; CDU and CSU have always formed a single united Fraktion. The size of a party's Fraktion determines the extent of its representation on legislative committees, the time slots alloted for speaking, the number of committee chairs it can hold, and its representation in executive bodies of the Bundestag. The Fraktionen, not the members, receive the bulk of government funding for legislative and administrative activities.

The leadership of each Fraktion consists of a parliamentary party leader, several deputy leaders, and an executive committee. The leadership's major responsibilities are to represent the Fraktion, enforce party discipline, and orchestrate the party's parliamentary activities. The members of each Fraktion are distributed among working groups focused on specific policy-related topics such as social policy, economics, and foreign policy. The Fraktion meets once a week to consider legislation before the Bundestag and formulate the party's position on it.

Parties which do not fulfill the criterion for being a Fraktion but which have got at least three seats by direct elections (i.e. which have got at least three MPs which represent a certain electoral district) in the Bundestag can be granted the status of a group of the Bundestag. This applied to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) from 1990-1998. This status entails some privileges which are in general less than those of a Fraktion. In the current Bundestag, there are no such groups (the PDS only had two MPs in parliament until 2005 and was thus not even considered a group anymore; the party has now returned to the Bundestag with full Fraktion status).

The Bundestag's executive bodies include the Council of Elders and the Presidium. The council consists of the Bundestag leadership, together with the most senior representatives of each Fraktion, with the number of these representatives tied to the strength of the party in the chamber. The council is the coordination hub, determining the daily legislative agenda and assigning committee chairpersons based on party representation. The council also serves as an important forum for interparty negotiations on specific legislation and procedural issues. The Presidium is responsible for the routine administration of the Bundestag, including its clerical and research activities. It consists of the chamber's president (usually elected from the largest Fraktion) and vice presidents (one from each Fraktion).

Most of the legislative work in the Bundestag is the product of standing committees, which exist largely unchanged throughout one legislative period. Although this is common practice in the U.S. Congress, it is uncommon in other parliamentary systems, such as the British House of Commons and the French National Assembly. The number of committees approximates the number of federal ministries, and the titles of each are roughly similar (e.g., defense, agriculture, and labor). Between 1987 and 1990, the term of the eleventh Bundestag, there were twenty-one standing committees. The distribution of committee chairs and the membership of each committee reflect the relative strength of the various parties in the chamber. In the eleventh Bundestag, the CDU/CSU chaired eleven committees, the SPD eight, the FDP one, and the environmentalist party, the Greens (Die Grünen), one. Unlike in the United States Congress, where all committees are chaired by members of the majority party, the German system allows members of the opposition party to chair a significant number of standing committees. These committees have either a small staff or no staff at all.

External links

http://www.bundestag.de - Official site
http://www.btw2002.de - 2002 elections

German Bundestag | German loanwords | Legislative Branch of the German Government | National legislatures | Politics of Germany

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