February 2008
Local Elections in Munich
citizens of the european union are also permitted to vote!
Some of the non-German readers of Munich Found may cast a vote for the
Oberbürgermeister (mayor), the
Stadtrat (city council) and the
Bezirksausschüsse (district committees) on March 2. Citizens who meet the following criteria may participate in local elections: They must be over eighteen, officially registered in Munich or another Bavarian borough for at least three months, and possess citizenship from a member country of the European Union. Essentially, this applies to our readers from Great Britain and Ireland. Behind this European law lies the idea that political participation in one’s chosen community should be possible regardless of one’s original nationality. (For parliamentary elections of the
Bundestag or the parliaments of Germany’s federal states, however, this possibility does not exist.)
Yet even for natives, the Bavarian local election laws are not so clear. Elections take place every six years within the mu-nicipalities, and are based on the so-called
Persönlichkeitswahl. At the election of the city council, voters choose a candidate from the list of his or her party. Each voter, however, has to assign a vote for every available seat in the city council. The Munich city council has 80 members, thus the voter has 80 votes that can be distributed in different ways. Voters may split the ticket on all parties (
panaschieren). It is also possible to give more than one vote to a candidate, which is called
häufeln (accumulating) and through this tactic one can vote a candidate to the top of a party’s list. A voter may cast up to three votes for a favored politician. If the arithmetic gets too complicated after that, the voter may mark a cross at the list of his or her preferred party. The remaining votes will be credited to the party. But be careful: If you accidentally cast more than the permitted number of votes, your entire ballot will be invalid. The simplest method, then, is just to mark one’s cross on the first line next to the party name, thereby distributing all 80 votes to the listed candidates equally. (If a name is listed more than once, it’s not a typo. The party is simply trying to assure a positive election result for this particular candidate.) Interestingly enough, the way an individual voter navigates this muddle can tell a lot about his or her party preferences: CSU voters prefer simple list voting; voters for
Die Grünen (green party) are “Häufelweltmeister” (world champions in accumulating votes); SPD voters use both methods equally.
Alongside the city council—or local council, in Starnberg—there exists a lower level of Munich decision-makers, the so-called
Bezirksausschüsse (district committees). Since 1998, those 25 “dis-trict parliaments” have been elected after the same system as the city council. All meetings of the district committees are open to the public. Bezirksausschuss 1 (BA 1) of Altstadt-Lehel, for example, always meets at the Hofbräuhaus, and all citizens may bring up their concerns or propositions here. If the majority of a district committee approves of a proposition, the city council is obligated to suggest a course of action regarding the submission.
A new mayor also will be elected on March 2. For this office, all parties designate one candidate. Each voter has one vote, and the candidate who gets more than half of all votes is elected. If no candidate is successful at first, a second ballot will be held fourteen days later. Theoretically, the election of the
Oberbürgermeister (or mayor or district chief executive) is a matter independent of the majority situation in
the city council (or the district committees).
Democracy works from the bottom up. So, don’t merely complain about politicians; use your voting right instead! Still, this is only possible if the borough, in which you
are registered, has sent you a
Wahlberech-tigung (right to vote) before February 10. If you have not received an election notice and believe you are entitled to vote, please call the electoral office at the
Kreisverwaltungsreferat München (district administration department) at Tel. 23 39 62 33, see
www.muenchen.de/wahl08, or contact the borough department that is responsible for you. Either will add you to the electoral roll. If you have lost your
Wahlberechtigung—on which, by the way, the address of your polling place is noted—a passport or identity card also suffices at the polling place. Of course, you can also participate in postal voting if you note it on your Wahlberechtigung and send it back to the polling place. But, as an EU citizen, a neighborly chat at the poll site of your residential quarter will surely make you feel a little more at home in Munich.
One final plug: If you live in Munich’s smallest borough, Bezirk 1 Altstadt-Lehel, you will have 15 votes. Those would be perfectly invested in the green party’s election list, which is headed by the publisher of Munich Found. <<<
