German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (R) and German Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil attend a debate at the Bundestag on November 28, 2025 in Berlin.
John MACDOUGALL / AFP
In the first week of December, the Bundestag’s Election Review Committee is expected to decide whether the party founded by Sahra Wagenknecht actually cleared the electoral threshold back in February. The ruling will be crucial for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose government rests on the narrowest of parliamentary majorities.
The BSW party, founded and led by Sahra Wagenknecht, gained 4.981% of the votes in the election to the 20th Bundestag on February 23, 2025. According to the official final tally, it missed the 5% threshold by just 9,523 votes. This number is decisive: only parties surpassing 5% enter parliament, and the 630 Bundestag seats are distributed proportionally based on the votes for the party lists. Falling short means zero seats, zero legislative influence, zero role in coalition-building. Yet, if those 9,523 votes were to surface, BSW would suddenly be allocated 34 seats. And this is where the situation becomes explosive. The governing CDU/CSU–SPD alliance elected Merz chancellor in May with 328 seats, which is only 12 above the absolute majority of 316. Should BSW cross the threshold, all other parties would lose seats proportionally. Most consequentially, CDU/CSU and SPD together would surrender 18 seats: enough to lose their majority.
Immediately after the election, BSW sought interim relief from the Federal Constitutional Court. The court dismissed the request in May as inadmissible but did not evaluate the substance of the complaint or investigate counting irregularities. Under the German constitution, election review begins not in the courts but in the Bundestag itself. Only after parliamentary review may a case be taken to the Constitutional Court. Accordingly, BSW also lodged a formal objection with the newly elected Bundestag. There, responsibility lies with the Election Review Committee, where CDU/CSU and SPD have the majority and which is chaired by SPD MP Macit Karaahmetoğlu. The committee did not rush at all: it convened for the first time on June 27—three months into the legislative period—and has held only one substantive session, in September. That meeting processed numerous complaints (mostly inadmissible ones), but not the decisive BSW challenge. Now, according to some reports, a ruling is expected in early December.
But what exactly is BSW claiming? The first category of concerns revolves around postal voting. Because the 2025 election was a snap election, deadlines for sending and returning ballots were unusually tight. Germans abroad faced difficulties, as many were reporting delays. Legally, however, the argument is weak. Anyone choosing postal voting accepts responsibility for timely return of ballots, and there is no evidence that BSW voters were disproportionately affected.
Far more significant are potential counting errors. As a newly registered party, BSW’s ballot position was assigned by lot: it landed at number 16, directly beneath the micro-party “Bündnis Deutschland” at number 15. Although position 16 clearly displayed the abbreviation “BSW,” it also contained the full name “Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.” The risk of confusion during voting and counting is obvious. “Bündnis Deutschland” ultimately received 87,955 votes (0.2 percent). There is no way to determine how many of these stemmed from voters confused between the two. Yet, the real question is how many votes may have been misallocated to “Bündnis Deutschland,” away from BSW, due to simple counting mistakes. Across Germany, 615,000 volunteers counted ballots in 95,000 polling stations. To illustrate: if in just one out of every ten stations a single BSW ballot was mistakenly recorded for “Bündnis Deutschland,” those missing 9,500 votes would already be found.
Recounts were conducted in roughly 200–250 polling stations (the exact number is not public), triggered by other irregularities. Strikingly, around 60% of corrected tallies involved votes initially not counted for BSW. Statistically, this is notable: random counting errors should affect the largest parties most (CSU/CSU first, AfD second, and so on). As a result, BSW’s result increased between the preliminary and final counts. Yet, the crucial 9,523 votes still remained missing. The obvious inference follows: if recounts in 250 stations produced measurable corrections, what might a recount in all 95,000 reveal? There are also districts where “Bündnis Deutschland” performed conspicuously well. Fabio De Masi, Member of the European Parliament for BSW, estimates that up to 30,000 BSW votes may be retrievable.
One is left wondering how a country famed for administrative precision could mishandle something as elementary as a list-based election. The problem begins with ballot design that enables confusion, but the deeper flaw lies in the election review process itself, which is almost entirely unsuited to correcting even basic counting errors. There is no provision for automatic recounts in tight results, nor for recounts ordered directly by electoral authorities. Instead, challenges must proceed, after the elections are held, through parliament. This means that those who may benefit from errors judge their own legitimacy. The incentives are plain: the CDU/CSU–SPD majority has no reason to risk its power by triggering a recount. Yet, a healthier democratic culture would prioritize electoral integrity above partisan interest. Instead, the political establishment has failed. CDU, CSU, and SPD maintain an awkward silence, leaving the Greens to comment. Predictably, Green MP Irene Mihalic argued that the review should follow a minimal principle so as not to undermine public trust in a free and secret vote. This reverses the logic entirely. When parliamentary majorities may depend on the outcome, review must follow a maximal principle: every mandate-relevant irregularity must be clarified as comprehensively as possible to ensure an unassailable, cross-party acceptance of the result. At this point, it is worth recalling that even during the 2021 federal election, several districts experienced chaos. Back then, the SPD–Green–FDP coalition delayed the election review for thirteen months, after which the Constitutional Court was forced to order a partial re-run of the vote.
Yet CDU/CSU and SPD remain mute. The SPD has no incentive to assist, as BSW is a direct competitor. CDU/CSU, by contrast, appear eager to keep strategic options open, potentially even as an exit route from a coalition already disastrous for them. By refusing to lead on transparency, the governing parties leave the field to the AfD—the very party they denounce as anti-democratic—which alone is consistently demanding a recount. The upcoming (closed-door) committee session will therefore be pivotal: will CDU/CSU and SPD rise to the moment? Might an alternative CDU/CSU–AfD majority force a recount against the coalition’s interest? Or will the issue simply be postponed in classic CDU fashion?
Should the committee reject the objection, BSW can make a final appeal to the Constitutional Court. Predicting the outcome of such a complaint is impossible at this moment. Yet if either the committee or the court ultimately orders a full recount, leading to BSW clearing the threshold, the consequences would be unprecedented. A sitting chancellor losing his majority due to an election review would be without parallel in the history of the German Federal Republic. Merz would likely need to bring the Greens into government, since CDU/CSU still refuses any cooperation with the AfD. That would mean new coalition talks, a new agreement, new ministries, and political chaos for Merz, who already struggles to keep his party aligned with the SPD. Add another left-leaning partner, and the AfD could cannibalize CDU and CSU in each new poll and state election up to the 2029 federal elections. Yet Merz largely authored this dilemma himself: by choosing the SPD over the AfD, he positioned his majority on this knife-edge. As the saying goes—you reap what you sow.
