A Spandau recount hands the AfD a seat and shrinks Berlin's parliament by five
The AfD's Tommy Tabor, not the CDU's Bettina Meißner, won Spandau's first constituency, by 35 votes. The knock-on cuts the Abgeordnetenhaus from 158 seats to 153.
The mistake was a single phone call. In one Spandau polling station the official record, the Niederschrift, was correct, but the quick result phoned through to the district election office was not. The routine check of the provisional result caught it, and a public recount of first votes on Thursday confirmed it: Bettina Meißner of the CDU, first declared the winner of Spandau constituency 1, is in fact 35 votes behind the AfD's Tommy Tabor. The district returning officer, Katrin Zickert, notes that the AfD also leads there on second votes.
Because Berlin balances overhang seats with extra seats for the other parties, that one constituency moves the whole chamber. State returning officer Stephan Bröchler now expects 153 seats instead of the 158 announced on election night. The CDU, SPD and Greens each lose one, the Left two. Five people who had counted on a seat will not get one: Meißner, Martin Matz (SPD), Oda Hassepaß (Greens), and Coco Aglibut and Bettina Günter of the Left. The AfD stays on 29.
The arithmetic of the coming government barely shifts. The Left, Greens and SPD, whose leaders began exploratory talks this week, would hold 91 of 153 seats, comfortably above the 77 needed. But Bröchler did have a warning for the parties: no one holds a mandate until the final result and the first sitting, and he called it "not a good procedure" that the CDU, SPD and AfD had already elected new group leaderships.
The figures are not yet "set in stone", he said; the state election committee decides on 12 October. After a 2021 election so flawed it had to be rerun, he wants the next one to digitise the polling station record, recounts included.