Exploring the proportional outcome of Germany’s 2025 Federal election

With around 84.5 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous country in western Europe. A German Federal election, where representatives are elected to the Bundestag (Germany’s national parliament), is therefore always an important event. From our perspective, it is particularly interesting to explore the outcomes of a major election that is conducted under a system of Proportional Representation (PR).

How the voting system works in Germany 

Since the Federal election of 1953, the second post-World War II election held in the Federal Republic of Germany, a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system has been used for German Federal elections. In the UK, we describe this electoral system as the Additional Member System (AMS).

In this system, a number of representatives are elected in First Past The Post (FPTP) constituency seats and a number of ‘additional’ representatives are elected via a Party List system. The election of ‘additional’ representatives seeks to make the overall result of the election more proportional than it would have been if representatives were elected only via First Past the Post.

Different MMP or AMS systems seek to achieve different levels of proportionality. Germany’s MMP system is at the very proportional end of that scale, with the overriding aim being for a party’s seat share in the Bundestag to closely match the party’s vote share in the Party List section of the election.

One of the ways this is achieved is by having more Bundestag seats reserved for members elected via the Party List section (331 seats) than via the FPTP constituency section (299 seats). In contrast, the AMS system used for Scottish Parliament elections has more FPTP constituency seats (73) than Party List seats (56), meaning that Scottish Parliamentary election outcomes are often slightly less proportional than those for German Federal elections.

MMP systems allow us the interesting opportunity to explore how an election result might have looked if it had been conducted using FPTP, without the ‘additional’ seats that make the overall result more proportional.

What happened this time? 

In this regard, the results from the 2025 German Federal election are striking. The CDU/CSU alliance came top in 190 of the Bundestag’s 299 FPTP constituency seats*. This represents nearly two-thirds (63.5%) of the FPTP constituency seats, on the basis of just under one-third (32.1%) of votes across the FPTP constituency seats.

This outcome is remarkably similar to the 2024 UK general election, held under FPTP, where Labour won 63.2% of seats, on the basis of 33.7% of votes, which was the most disproportional election in the history of the UK.

The voting system does a far better job of reflecting the wishes of voters 

The difference between the German and UK electoral systems are the ‘additional’ seats that that mean the outcome of the 2025 German Federal election much more closely reflects how people voted than the 2024 UK general election did. Therefore, despite winning two-thirds of the FPTP constituency seats, the CDU/CSU won only one-third (33.0%) of Bundestag seats overall because its overperformance in the FPTP constituency section meant it was entitled to very few of the ‘additional’ seats.

Like many proportional systems, Germany’s includes an electoral threshold that parties need to achieve in order to enter the Bundestag. In this case a party needs to receive a minimum 5% of Party List votes across the country, or win a minimum of 3 FPTP constituencies, in order to enter the Bundestag and receive representation in line with their nationwide Party List vote.

Inevitably, some parties do not meet this threshold, which means that those parties who do reach the threshold receive slightly higher seat shares than their national Party List vote share. Despite this, there can be no denying that Germany’s MMP system has done a far better job of reflecting the wishes of German voters than the FPTP system did at last year’s UK general election. This is reflected in the below Party List vote shares and seat shares in the Bundestag:

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*in order to set the size of the Bundestag at 630 members but still retain overall proportionality, based on national List vote shares, a new rule was introduced for this election. If a party wins more FPTP constituency seats within a state than the overall number of seats that it is entitled to in that state, some of the FPTP winners from that party are excluded from the Bundestag. For example, where a party wins two more FPTP constituencies in a state than the overall number of seats that it is entitled to, the FPTP winners from that party with the two lowest vote shares will be excluded from the Bundestag. In the 2025 election, 23 candidates who came top in a FPTP constituency were excluded from the Bundestag – 18 from CDU/CSU; 4 from AfD; 1 from SPD. This means that technically there are 276 Bundestag members elected from FPTP constituencies and 354 elected from Party Lists.