Karlsruhe judge sees conditions as in a dictatorship
Federal constitutional judge Peter Müller has massively criticized the Berlin election mishaps and recorded conditions as in a dictatorship. The former Prime Minister of the Saarland showed up in the Podcast “Objection” of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung amazed at what happened during the elections to the House of Representatives and the Bundestag.
If that is how it is presented in the media, “then it should be a one-off case,” said Müller. Conditions were described that one was tempted to say, “Something like this could have been imagined a few centuries ago in some dictatorial developing country, but not in the middle of Europe, in the middle of Germany”.
As far as he can see, these are “actual processes that have never taken place in a comparable way, at least in Germany”. Müller, who is responsible for electoral law in the second senate of the Federal Constitutional Court, also said that the distribution of mandates under the Federal Elections Act had “meanwhile reached a level of complexity that, in my view, is no longer transparent for the average citizen”. An abstract norm control procedure against this regulation is currently underway.
A repeat election in Berlin is becoming more and more likely
The Berliner Constitutional Court holds the elections to Berlin after an initial assessment House of Representatives and to the district council meetings (BVV) are invalid. The court “tends to declare the elections to the House of Representatives and the BVVen as a whole invalid,” it said in a press release. The elections would then have to be repeated throughout Berlin.
The constitutional and administrative lawyer Christian Pestalozza, on the other hand, was surprised at the preliminary assessment of the Constitutional Court. “The extent of a repeat election must be in proportion to the election errors,” said the professor from the Free University of Berlin to the German Press Agency. “You can’t make new elections across the board if the election was largely error-free.”
When the verdict on the validity of the election WILL be pronounced is not certain. After the oral hearing, in which numerous participants had their say, the judges want to continue to discuss the matter.