How Germany is governed

Seat figures are the allocations made at the most recent election for each parliament, with the election date given. Sitting membership can drift later through defections.

1. Governance architecture

Germany is a federal parliamentary republic. The founding document is the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of 1949, written to stop a repeat of Weimar’s collapse: a weak president, a fragmented parliament, and emergency powers that could be turned against the republic.

Executive and legislature are fused. The Federal Chancellor is elected by, and depends on, a majority in the Bundestag. The judiciary is independently staffed and routinely strikes down statutes.

The federation writes a large share of the law. The Länder execute it. That is cooperative federalism, not a US-style split of separate policy domains.

The Land tier is the under-noticed one: state governments run the police and schools and send voting blocs into the federal upper house.

2. Key roles

Chains of authority

Solid arrows are chains of authority. The Bundestag–Bundesrat link is the main federal bottleneck. The court sits off to the side and can veto both.

3. How people reach these roles

Chancellor and cabinet

Must already be senior party figures. The unwritten requirement is the Ochsentour (“ox-trek”): decades through local and Land party machines. Outsiders with money or a media profile almost never jump the queue.

Bundestag MPs

Either win a single-member constituency on the first vote, or sit high enough on a Land party list. List placement is controlled by the party. Loyalty beats independent wealth.

Constitutional Court judges

Half chosen by the Bundestag, half by the Bundesrat, each by a two-thirds supermajority. That forces a cross-camp bargain and keeps out extreme partisans.

Minister-presidents

Almost always the lead candidate of the largest coalition party in the Landtag, after coalition talks — not a direct personal election.

4. Interrelationships

The system is built for compromise and delay.

• The federation legislates; the Länder administer. A federal majority is not enough if the bill needs Bundesrat consent.
• When Bundestag and Bundesrat are in opposing camps, bills go to the Mediation Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss) for a closed-door rewrite.
• Power concentrates when the same camp holds the chancellery, a Bundestag majority, and enough Land governments to clear 35 of 69 Bundesrat votes.
• Judicial check: in July 2024 the Constitutional Court struck down the attempt to abolish the Grundmandatsklausel. The 2025 Bundestag was elected under the repaired 630-seat cap plus that restored exception.

5. Incentives and tradeoffs

MPs gain a stable salary (Diäten), a strong pension, and a path into advisory work. They face side-income transparency rules that regularly end careers.

The 2023–24 electoral reform created a new tradeoff. Winning a constituency no longer guarantees a seat. Under Zweitstimmendeckung (“second-vote coverage”), a local winner is dropped if the party’s national second-vote share does not cover that seat. That pushes candidates to protect the party brand, not just the district.

Short Land cycles and staggered calendars mean a chancellor is almost always campaigning in someone else’s election. The Saxony-Anhalt result of 6 September 2026 immediately strained the federal CDU/CSU–SPD cabinet, even though it does not change Bundestag arithmetic.

6. Outside influence

7. Electoral system and mathematics

System (Bundestag, from 2025): proportional representation with a fixed 630 seats, Sainte-Laguë allocation on the second vote, a 5% national threshold, and the three-constituency exception. Constituency winners (first vote) are seated only if the second-vote quota covers them.

Conversion: second-vote share maps to seat share almost one-for-one among parties that clear the threshold. Distortion comes from the threshold itself (FDP at 4.3% in 2025: zero seats), not from first-past-the-post.

2025, the real list. 299 neighbourhoods. 276 winners sat. 23 empty — they won the first mark and still have no MP. Ranked by first-vote share in that Land, not raw votes. CDU 143 / 128 sit. CSU 47 / 44. AfD 46 / 42. SPD 45 / 44. Greens 12 / 12. The Left 6 / 6.

Best display: a 299-dot strip on the picture-book count card (colour = winner; dashed = empty). The named list is below. A pie of Bundestag seats hides the empty neighbourhoods.

The 23 empty neighbourhoods

Neighbourhoods by Land

The empty ones cluster in city CDU/CSU races and a few eastern AfD wins where the Land quota was already full. NRW’s 64 all sat.

All 299 neighbourhoods

Schleswig-Holstein

Hamburg

Lower Saxony

Bremen

North Rhine-Westphalia

Hesse

Rhineland-Palatinate

Baden-Württemberg

Bavaria

Saarland

Berlin

Brandenburg

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

Saxony

Saxony-Anhalt

Thuringia

Sainte-Laguë, tiny example. Two parties, 10 seats. Votes: A 6,000; B 4,000. Dividers are 1, 3, 5, 7, … Highest quotients take seats.

A win is not a government. Coalition talks follow. In 2025 they ran from late February to 5 May; the chancellor vote was 6 May. The previous cabinet remains as caretaker until then.

8. Citizen-to-representative chain

Turnout is highest for the Bundestag and lowest locally — the inverse of how often the citizen actually meets the state.

9. The ballot paper

A Bundestag ballot is a wide two-column sheet (often A3).

• One mark per column. No ranking, no photos required by federal law. Party names dominate the right column.
• An informed voter needs well under a minute. The decisive mark is a party brand, not a long list of judges or sheriffs.
• Paper ballot, counted by hand in public. The voter does not get an individual electronic receipt; secrecy is the point.

10. Visualizations

A. Population in approximate geographic layout

Figures are Destatis population at 31 December 2025, rounded to 0.1 million. Cells sit roughly where the Land sits. Colour is AfD vote share at the last Land election (additional layer on the original geographic grid).

B. Population scaled by size

Box width is proportional to population. Colour is again AfD vote share, so you can read “where the people are” against “where AfD is strongest.” NRW, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg together are about 42 million people — half the country.

C. National seats — Bundestag, 23 February 2025

Final official result, Federal Returning Officer. 630 seats (capped). AfD: 152 seats, 20.8% of second votes, second-largest party, largest opposition group. FDP missed the 5% line (4.3%) and has no seats. SSW (Danish minority) is exempt from the threshold: 1 seat.

Governing coalition from 6 May 2025: CDU/CSU 208 + SPD 120 = 328. Absolute majority is 316. In the hemicycle that is not one block: SPD sits on the left; Union and AfD sit on the right.

D. Bundesrat — 69 votes, not a second elected house

Votes follow population bands, not election results: 6 / 5 / 4 / 3. A Land must cast them as one block. Opposition parties in a Landtag have no Bundesrat votes. AfD is in no Land government (the Brandmauer / firewall). As of 9 September 2026 it therefore has 0 of 69, including Saxony-Anhalt, where the old government keeps the four votes until a new cabinet is sworn.

E. Land parliaments — AfD share at the last election

Ordered by AfD vote share. Seats are the allocation on election night (or the official final count). Bremen: AfD was disqualified from the ballot in 2023 after two competing lists; it won 0 seats.

Eastern Länder sit at the top. AfD is a large plurality party in the east and a mid-sized opposition party in most of the west, with two western exceptions at zero allocated seats (Schleswig-Holstein: below 5%; Bremen: barred).

F. Additional — full party bars in every Landtag

Same chambers as above, now with every party that took seats at that election (not only AfD). Hesse, Lower Saxony and Berlin later saw defections; bars are election allocations.

11. Electoral calendar

Germany does not hold a single national polling day. Landtage run on staggered five-year cycles (Bremen: four). The chancellor follows the Bundestag. The president is elected by a Federal Convention, not by the public. Exact dates appear only after they are officially announced; later years are the indicated window from the Bundestag and Federal Returning Officer calendars.

Federal offices and chambers

Länder — last election and next due

Sorted by the next Landtag date. Done just voted. Set means the Bundestag or Federal Returning Officer already print a day. Indicated means the season is published, not yet gazetted.

A Land election does not automatically flip the Bundesrat. Only the parties that then form the Land government send ministers. That is why Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD plurality on 6 September has not moved the 0-of-69 federal upper-house figure.

Municipal elections (mayors, councils) run on their own calendars and are omitted here except Lower Saxony on 13 September 2026, which falls inside this snapshot week.

12. When these allocations were made

Germany does not hold all Land elections on one day. Each row is the election that produced the numbers in section 10.

Bundesrat still 0 AfD votes because seats in a Landtag are not votes in the Bundesrat. Only governing parties send ministers. No other party has entered a coalition with AfD. Saxony-Anhalt’s four votes remain with the outgoing government until a new one takes office.

13. Sources and confidence