Berlin-Wahl 2021 – 3. und 4. Akt des Dramas1

Abstract

On the 19th December 2023, the verdict of the BVerfG on the Berlin Chaos election of 26th September 2021 was issued . The verdict only refers to the Bundestag election, which took place on that day together with the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives . As often reported, there was an unusually large number of irregularities, which is why the Berlin VerfGH declared the Berlin-related elections invalid as a whole and ordered a com- plete repeat election . Since the Bundestag election and the Berlin elections were connected, the question arises whether the BVerfG, on the one hand, and the Berlin VerfGH, on the other hand, applied the same criteria for determining electoral failures and dealing with them . Because, unlike the VerfGH, the BVerfG ordered a repeat election to the Bundestag for only about a fifth of the voters . A more detailed analysis of the two judgments shows that, in particular, the consequences of election failures were assessed differently by the two courts . While the BVerfG gave a very high priority to the continuation of the once-elected parliament and thus came to a repeat election as limited as possible, the VerfGH drew the opposite conclusion from the mass of failures . In the interest of an understanding of the relevant legal terms as uniform as possible, it would have been appropriate that the VerfGH had submitted its intended decision to the BVerfG in advance .