Berlin’s top court has ordered a rerun of last September’s municipal elections, the culmination of a scandal that led to widespread complaints about how Germany’s capital city is governed.
The court completely nullified the September 26 elections to Berlin’s state parliament, which appointed the city’s current centre-left mayor, Franziska Giffey, and its 12 district councils, saying it had concluded that that was the only way to “safeguard constitutional standards”. A rerun must be carried out within 90 days.
The chaos of election day in Berlin, a city of 3.6mn people, which last year coincided with the annual marathon, came as a shock to a nation that prides itself on the smooth running of its institutions. The court described it as a “unique event in postwar German electoral history”.
Berliners had to queue for hours at polling stations, with many giving up and going home without casting their vote. There was a shortage of ballot boxes and ballot papers, and some polling stations were forced to stay open long after the official closing time of 6pm, when broadcasters were already using exit polls to predict the election result.
The court said at least 20,000-30,000 votes were affected by “electoral mistakes”, a number high enough to have had an impact on the allocation of seats in the parliament and councils.
“A complete rerun of the election is the only way to ensure the composition of the parliament and councils meets the constitutional requirements of democratic elections,” it said.
The court said the problems started with early preparations for the election, during which officials vastly underestimated the number of eligible voters per polling station, and the time it would take them to cast their ballots. Last year’s election was particularly complex because voters were not only being asked to elect MPs for the Bundestag and Berlin parliament and councillors for all the city’s district councils, but also to vote in a referendum on whether to expropriate private residential property owners.
The court also said that at least five of 12 electoral districts received the wrong ballot papers, while others didn’t receive enough.
In some constituencies officials dealt with the shortage by simply making copies of ballot forms on the spot. However, votes cast on these were invalid because they “didn’t meet the statutory provisions” of German law.
Some polling stations shut down temporarily without telling waiting voters when they would reopen.
The court said “not just a few but thousands of eligible voters had not been able to cast their vote at all on election day in Berlin, or . . . were only able to do so under unacceptable conditions”. That had violated the “principles of freedom, universality and equality as applied to elections that are set out in the constitution of the state of Berlin”.
The court rejected the idea of rerunning the poll in only a handful of constituencies, “given the large number and gravity of the election mistakes”.
The court’s verdict came just days after MPs voted to rerun last September’s elections to the Bundestag in 431 electoral districts in the capital, citing the same irregularities flagged by the Berlin court. However, the Bundestag vote is expected to be challenged in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court.