2005 German federal election

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2005 federal elections 614 Bundestag seats 308 seats required for most
Date						Sunday, 18 September 2005
Type						Federal See list 299 seats chosen by single-minal majority scrutiny in single-member constituencies (CU). 315 seats chosen through multi-ethnic majority scrutiny in multi-member constituencies (LP).
Period						2005-2009
Electoral demography
Population					81,205,222
Registered						61.870.711
Voters						48,044,134
Participation
							77.65 %1.4 %
Valid votes						LP: 47,287,988 CU: 47,194,062
Null vote						LP: 756,146 CU: 850,072
Results
			CDU/CSU
			Votes			16,631,04910%
			Collections						22622
									35.17 %
			SPD
			Votes			16,194,66512.4 %
			Collections						22229
									34.25 %
			FDP
			Votes			4,648,14431.4 %
			Collections						6114
									9.83 %
			PDS/WASG
			Votes			4,118,19463.7 %
			Collections						5452
									8.71 %
			B’90/Die Grünen
			Votes			3,838,3266.6 %
			Collections						514
									8.12 %
Results by uninomial district and state
Composition of the Bundestag
222SPD180CDU61FDP						54PDS/WASG51B’90/Die Grünen46CSU
Federal Chancellor of Germany
Owner Gerhard Schröder						Elect Angela Merkel
Notes
↑ a b The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU). Brother parties are considered, as they cooperate on several issues. Representatives of both parties to the Bundestag share a common faction, CDU/CSU

The 2005 German federal election was held on Sunday, September 18, 2005 to elect members of the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament, after a failed vote of confidence for Gerhard Schröder on July 1st.

Call for elections

Schröder asked his followers to abstain from voting on that occasion in order to anticipate the federal parliamentary elections, since his party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been defeated by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in one of the large-population federal states, North Rhine-Westphalia, on May 22, 2005. With this electoral victory, the CDU, led by Angela Merkel, had obtained a two-thirds majority of the votes in the Bundesrat—the Upper House and representative body of the federated states—which would have allowed it to block practically any law approved by the red-green majority in the Bundestag.

After the voluntary defeat in the confidence motion, Schröder requested the dissolution of the Bundestag from the federal president, Horst Köhler, arguing that he could no longer count on a stable government majority (one of the few reasons that allow the dissolution of the German parliament, which, unlike many other European parliaments, does not have the right to dissolve itself).

After Köhler agreed to this request and called early elections, some deputies filed a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court, arguing that, since Schröder had lost the vote of confidence on purpose, he had not actually lost his government majority, therefore the dissolution of parliament would have been unconstitutional. However, the judges ratified the procedure, explaining that it is not up to the Court to question the individual reasons that deputies may have when making a parliamentary decision.

Election campaign

At the start of the campaign, the CDU, together with its sister party in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU), gained a 21% lead over the SPD in opinion polls and was expected to win by a landslide and form government with the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), displacing the SPD coalition with the Greens. However, throughout the campaign, the CDU/CSU – which focused its electoral program on proposing neoliberal reforms for the tax system and the labor market – lost a lot of support and ended up winning with less than 1% of the vote. advantage over the SPD.

A decisive factor during the last months before the elections was the transformation of the Left Party at the federal level, which signed a former president of the SPD, Oskar Lafontaine, and presented itself as an alternative to the left of Schröder's government, thus managing to recover the parliamentary representation that it had lost as PDS in the 2002 elections.

Candidates

• 

  Angela Merkel (CDU)

• 

  Gerhard Schröder (SPD)

• 

  Joschka Fischer (Verdes)

• 

  Guido Westerwelle (FDP)

• 

  Lothar Bisky (PDS)

Results

With the election results, the ruling coalition of SPD and Greens, led by Gerhard Schröder, lost its majority in the Bundestag, going from 306 seats (out of a total of 603) to 273 seats (out of a total of 614). However, due to the entry of the Left Party into parliament, the opposition coalition under Angela Merkel, formed by CDU/CSU and FDP, did not obtain a majority either, with 287 seats.

With any coalition with the participation of the Left Party ruled out (which Schröder had repeatedly rejected during the campaign), only three options remained:

• the "Semaphorus Coalition" (SPD-FDP-Verdes, so called by the colors associated with these matches: red, yellow and green),
• the " Jamaican Coalition" (CDU/CSU-FDP-Verdes, for the colors of these matches and the flag of the Caribbean country: black, yellow and green),
• the "great coalition" (CDU/CSU-SPD, so called for the two major parties).

Both a "traffic light coalition" as a "Jamaica coalition" They would have represented a novelty in the German political system, where since the 1950s there had never been coalitions at the federal level with more than two parties. Although Schröder, on the same election night, publicly offered a "traffic light pact" to the FDP, this was flatly rejected by the liberal leader Guido Westerwelle. On the other hand, after conversations between the leaders of the CDU and the Greens, the latter also ruled out the Jamaica coalition for not finding sufficient programmatic coincidences between both parties.

Therefore, finally, in November 2005 CDU/CSU and SPD agreed to form a grand coalition government (which did have a precedent at the federal level between 1966 and 1969) under Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Definitive official results

The results were:

List - Leader			Direct song ("first vote")					Party List ("second vote")					Total seats
			Votes	%	+/-	Scalls	+/-	Votes	%	+/-	Scalls	+/-	Total	+/-	%
	Coalition (CDU/CSU) Angela Merkel		19.280.940	40.8 per cent	-0.3%	150	+25	16.631.049	35.2 per cent	-3.3.	76	- 47	226	-22	36.8 per cent
		Christian Democratic Union	15.390.950	32.6 per cent	+0.5%	106	+24	13.136.740	27.8 per cent	-1.7%	74	- 34	180	-10	29.3%
		Christian Social Union of Bavaria	3.889.990	8.2 per cent	- 0.8%	44	+1	3.494.309	7.4%	-1.6%	2	-13	46	-12	7.5%
	Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Gerhard Schröder		18.129.100	38.4 per cent	- 3.5%	145	-26	16.194.665	34.2 per cent	- 4.3.	77	-3	222	-29	36.2 per cent
	Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) Guido Westerwelle		2.208.531	4.7%	-1.1%	0	0	4.648.144	9.8%	+2.4%	61	+14	61	+14	9.9%
	Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) Lothar Bisky		3.764.168	8,0%	+3.7%	3	+1	4.118.194	8.7%	+4.7%	51	+51	54	+52	8.8%
	Alliance 90/Green (B90/Grünen) Joschka Fischer		2.538.913	5.4 per cent	-0.2%	1	0	3.838.326	8.1 per cent	-0.5%	50	-4	51	-4	8.3 per cent
	Other		1.272.410	2.7%	-	0	0	1.857.610	3.9 per cent	-	0	0	0	0	-
	Null/white voices		850,072	-	-	-	-	756,146	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
	Totals		48.044.134	100%	-	299	0	48.044.134	100%	-	315	+11	614	+11	100%
	Participation														77.7%

Notes:

• CDU and CSU form a single parliamentary group in the Bundestag and are not faced in any constituency. The CSU only occurs in the federated state of Bavaria while the CDU is present in all other states.
• Results include 9 additional seats (Überhangmandate) of the SPD in the states of Brandenburg (3), Hamburg (1), Sarre (1) and Saxony-Anhalt (4) and 7 additional seats of the CDU in the states of Baden-Wurtemberg (3) and Saxony (4).

Anecdotes

On September 8, 2005, the death of the NPD party candidate in an electoral district of Dresden was reported, so the election in that district was postponed until October 2 while the ballots were reprinted. This meant that the official final result was only known at the beginning of October, both for the local representative elected in Dresden and the impact of this on the list votes in the proportional total. Due to the close distance between the CDU/CSU and SPD at the federal level, this election could in fact have been decisive. However, in the end it didn't change the result at all.