Candidate nomination under time pressure?

from Anastasia Pyschny, Maura Kratz and Sebastian Unsicker

DOI: 10.36206/BP2025.02

The nomination of candidates for the German Bundestag is a multi-stage process that determines who the citizens can elect to parliament. The early election on 23 February 2025 inevitably influenced this process, as the deadline for submitting internal party nominations had to be brought forward. This challenge for the parties was hardly discussed in the media. Discussions with board members from the district and state associations of all parties represented in the Bundestag, as well as the FDP and the BSW, reveal that procedural changes were sometimes necessary in the internal party nomination process. The parties with the largest memberships, the SPD and CDU, were exempt from this.

The most important facts in brief:

Before the early Bundestag election, little was said about the challenge for the parties to nominate their candidates on time. The new election has had the following impact on the candidate line-up:

1. As with the early Bundestag election in 2005, nominations had to be submitted by the 34th day before the election. The deadline for submission was 20 January 2025.
2. Previous candidate nominations show that the parties with a larger membership (SPD and CDU) nominated their constituency candidates much earlier than parties with a smaller membership, such as the AfD and Die Linke, suggesting that the latter were under greater time pressure in the early election. The interview data supports this assumption.
3. Although the state list nominations usually take place after the constituency nominations, no greater time pressure was observed in the list nominations.
4. The early election not only led to postponements in some candidate meetings, but also to procedural changes in the nomination process.