Volker Ulrich was in no mood for the usual magnanimous pleasantries on election night in Augsburg. The Bavarian politician, candidate for the Christian Social Union (CSU), had just discovered that, despite winning his constituency, he would not be entering parliament after all.

That was down to an electoral reform introduced by the previous government in 2023: To reduce the unwieldy and increasingly costly size of the parliament, which reached a record 735 parliamentarians in 2021, Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats agreed to cap the number of Bundestag members at 630.

Germans get two votes in each general election, designed to balance local representatives and national parties: The "first" vote is for their preferred local candidate, the "second" vote for the national party they support. As the party's overall representation — determined by the "second vote" — was not allowed to exceed their proportional representation in parliament, 23 candidates across Germany who won the most direct "first votes" for their seat couldn't enter parliament.

One of these unlucky winners was Ulrich, and he was seething. So when Green Party candidate Claudia Roth — who had voted with her party for the reform but was herself assured of a parliamentary seat via the second vote — came over to congratulate him, the winning conservative saw not green but red. In an ugly exchange captured on camera and inevitably uploaded to X, Ulrich refused to shake Roth's hand and told her: "You are not a democrat!"

Ulrich later apologized for his........

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