Berlin gears up to repeat botched elections
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Loading... - Chantal Dubois
- 09 Feb 2023
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The unprecedented fiasco of Berlin's elections in September 2021 caused international headlines. Now the German capital is preparing to repeat the vote, with authorities doing all they can to repair broken trust.
Berlin goes to the polls for an unprecedented repeat election on Sunday, with what many think is the credibility of Germany's democratic institutions on the line.
Authorities in the German capital have been under extra scrutiny since last November, when the state's Constitutional Court annulled the state and municipal elections held on September 26, 2021, and handed down a damning verdict on a badly mishandled election day: Delays forced people to stand in line for many hours, as some ballot stations ran out of ballot papers and hastily photocopied more, other ballots had the wrong candidates listed on them, some stations had to close temporarily, while others remained open longer than they should have – making it possible to vote even after first results had been published. Meanwhile, the city's marathon held on the same day hampered attempts to resupply them.
Altogether, the court concluded, votes for around 60% of the seats in Berlin's state parliament were affected by the problems, and though no wrongdoing was alleged, it was, as many politicians have admitted since, deeply embarrassing. Never before has an election in Germany been botched so badly that it would have to be repeated.
Nor are all the legal issues resolved: The federal Constitutional Court last week dismissed a bid to stop Sunday's election repeat, but it also deferred making a final decision — opening the possibility that this new election could be annulled too.
And there is still a question dangling over the federal election, which took place on the same day. The federal parliament, the Bundestag, decided last year that the election would have to be repeated in 431 of Berlin's 2,256 polling stations. But it's unclear when that will happen, since the decision is subject to yet another appeal in the federal Constitutional Court.
Politically, the election fiasco is proving particularly disastrous for Berlin's Social Democrat Mayor Franziska Giffey, who now finds herself trailing in the polls to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
More time in the voting booth
Berlin's election organizers have a tight schedule to stick to. The court set a 90-day deadline for the new election, which is a challenge. "Normally we'd have a year to organize an election," says the man shouldering the pressure: Stephan Bröchler, a professor of political administration who became Berlin's new election director in October 2022, having spent nine months on the commission investigating the original election disasters. Read More…
