Ganz Berlin will have to re-elect next year. The country’s constitutional court made that more than clear on Wednesday. “Only a complete repetition of the election can bring about a constitutional situation,” said Court President Ludgera Selting. Otherwise, “confidence in democracy would be severely damaged”.
Her more than half-hour speech in a lecture hall at the Free University, where the public hearing took place, was a sharp reckoning with the electoral organization in Berlin, with the state election commission and the former Interior Senator. Although the verdict has not yet been pronounced, Selting, who was elected head of the court by the House of Representatives with a large majority at the suggestion of the SPD in 2019, made it clear that there would only be changes “in one place or another”. If the integrity of the election is not given and the many mistakes are relevant to the mandate as a whole, i.e. have an influence on the distribution of seats, as the court found, the verdict can hardly be different.
