Wiesbaden. The majority of the state parliament in Wiesbaden decided to reform in local election law around a year before the next local elections in Hesse. Among other things, the voting count will change in the future. Schwarz-Rot voted for the opposition groups of Greens, AfD and FDP voted against it. According to the will of the CDU and the SPD, the d’Hondtsche maximum number process should come into play instead of the Hare-Niemeyer procedure as before. The opposition sees the reform, in which the hurdles for digital session formats are also to be reduced, critically and fears a disadvantage of smaller parties. The different counting methods can have an impact on the distribution of seats in a parliament. According to experts, larger parties are somewhat favored using the d’Hondchen process. In the spring of 2026, municipal parliaments are to be re -elected in Hesse. “The new local law is a milestone for our municipalities,” said Interior Minister Roman Poseck (CDU) at the third reading of the reform. “We increase the ability of the municipalities to act, reduce bureaucracy and ensure more freedom of design on site,” added the minister. The conversion of the counting procedure should counteract fragmentation into municipal parliaments. In addition, there will be no one-person fractions in the future. Poseck recalled the 16 groups in the Frankfurt city parliament. According to the FDP parliamentarian Oliver Stirböck, the reform “the big ones bigger and the little ones even smaller”. His group colleague Moritz Promny spoke in a message of a distortion of the will to voters. The FDP does not want to allow the democratic diversity in municipal parliaments to disappear: “Our faction therefore examines the passage to the State Court.” The Green MP Vanessa Gronemann formulated the impression in the state parliament “that the CDU and SPD want to make their own local parliaments”. AfD parliamentary group leader Robert Lambrou broke a lance for one-person factions: they also come up with important debate contributions. To speak of a fragmentation of local parliaments is an exaggeration. The Hare-Niemeyer procedure is named according to the English lawyer Thomas Hare and the Aachen Professor Horst Niemeyer. In this system, all votes for a party are multiplied by the number of parliamentary seats to be awarded. This sum is then divided by the total number of votes of all parties participating in the distribution of seats. The number for the parties describes the number before the comma. If there are still mandates afterwards, they are distributed behind the comma according to the height of the digits. In the calculation procedure named after the Belgian legal professor Victor D ‘Hondt, the votes of the parties are divided by 1, 2, 3 and so on and the results are noted in a table. At the beginning of the highest number, a seat is then assigned to the corresponding party, then a seat for the second highest number, then for the third highest number and so on. (dpa)
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