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This article is part of the series Politics of Germany |
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The Bundesrat ("federal council") is the representation of the 16 Federal States (Bundesländer) of Germany at the federal level. It has its seat at the former Prussian Herrenhaus (House of Lords) in Berlin.
It is frequently stated that Germany has a bicameral parliament (with the Bundestag and Bundesrat being the lower and upper houses, respectively), but this is debatable in the strict sense the term is used with the parliaments of other countries. For one, its members are not elected representatives but delegates appointed by the Land governments, and they are not free in their vote but are required to follow the instructions of the Land governments. Thus the concept of "term of office" becomes meaningless as it does not matter which persons do the actual voting. Also, not all laws require the consent of the Bundesrat. This distinction isn't entirely clear cut, however. The United Kingdom's House of Lords, which is generally considered to be the upper house of a bicameral parliament, is not theoretically required to assent to any Bill. Still, common terminology in Germany (and in German textbooks) is that the Bundestag is Germany's parliament, and the Bundesrat is an institution in its own right.
Bundesrat delegates tend to be Land government ministers. The majority in the Bundesrat can change at any Land election, which are relatively evenly spread out across time, 3 to 4 occurring in any year on average. The Bundesrat has sixty-nine seats (not "members" as the personal identity is of no concern, as described above). The Länder with more than 7 million inhabitants have six seats (Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and North Rhine-Westphalia). The Länder with populations of between 6 and 7 million have five seats (Hesse), those with populations of between 2 million and 6 million four (Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia). The least populous Länder, with fewer than 2 million inhabitants, receive three seats each (Bremen, Hamburg, and the Saarland). This system of representation, although designed to reflect Land populations more accurately than equal representation would, in fact still affords greater representation per inhabitant to the smaller Länder. The presidency of the Bundesrat rotates annually among the Länder. The president of the Bundesrat is deputy to the President of Germany. By law, each Land delegation is required to vote as a bloc in accordance with the instructions of the Land government, thus Lands with coalition governments usually abstain if the matter isn't agreed on by the involved parties on the federal level; however in accord with the German constitution such abstentions count as a "nay" vote. A law passed in 2002 with a split vote by the Brandenburg delegation was declared void by the German Constitutional Court.
Because the Bundesrat is so much smaller than the Bundestag, and also because it is more or less an organized cooperation of Land governments rather than a real parliament, it does not require the extensive organizational structure of the lower house. The Bundesrat typically schedules plenary sessions once a month for the purpose of voting on legislation prepared in committee. In comparison, the Bundestag conducts about fifty plenary sessions a year. The voting Bundesrat delegates themselves rarely attend committee sessions; instead, they delegate that responsibility to civil servants from their ministries, as allowed for in the Basic Law. The delegates tend to spend most of their time in their Land capitals, rather than in the federal capital.
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