Süddeutsche Zeitung
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest daily newspapers in Germany. On 6 October 1945, five months after the end of World War II in Germany, the SZ was the first newspaper to receive a license from the U. S. military administration of Bavaria. The first issue was published the same evening printed from the repurposed presses that had printed Mein Kampf; the first article begins with: For the first time since the collapse of the brown rule of terror, a newspaper run by Germans is published in Munich. It is limited by the political necessities of our days, but it is not bound by censorship, nor gagged by constraints of conscience; the front page of the first issue can be read here. A reversal in ad sales in the early 2000s was so severe that it brought the paper to the brink of bankruptcy in October 2002; the Süddeutsche survived through a 150 million euro investment by a new shareholder, a regional newspaper chain called Südwestdeutsche Medien. Over a period of three years, the newspaper underwent a reduction in its staff, from 425, to 307, the closing of a regional edition in Düsseldorf, the scrapping of a section devoted to news from Berlin.
In spring 2004, SZ launched the Süddeutsche Bibliothek. Each week, one out of 50 famous novels of the 20th century was made available in hardcover at certain newsstands and in book shops. A series of 50 influential movies on DVD followed. In late 2004 the daily launched a popular science magazine, SZ Wissen. In late 2005 a series of children's books continued this branch of special editions. In early 2015, the newspaper received a 2.6-terabyte data set from an anonymous source. The dataset contained confidential information of a law firm offering the management of offshore companies; the newspaper in conjunction with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reviewed the data from the Panama Papers for over a year before publishing stories from it on 3 April 2016. In the late 2017, the newspaper released snippets from a 1.4-terabyte data set to be known as the Paradise Papers containing about 13.4 million documents, throwing light on the financial offshore jurisdictions, whose workings are unveiled, including Bermuda, the HQ of the main company involved, corporate services provider Estera, corporate registries in Caribbean and Singapore-based international trust and corporate services provider, Asiaciti Trust.
It contains the names of companies. The newspaper called in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to oversee the investigation. BBC Panorama and the Guardian are among the nearly 100 media groups investigating the papers; the leaked data covers seven decades, from 1950 to 2016. The title abbreviated SZ, translates as "South German Newspaper", it is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a high circulation abroad. The editorial stance of the newspaper is liberal and of centre-left, leading some to joke that the SZ is the only opposition in the state of Bavaria, governed by the conservative Christian Social Union of Bavaria continuously since 1949. In the 2013 elections the paper was among the supporters of the SPD. SZ is published in Nordisch format; the national edition features four sections: Politics, Culture and Sports. Editions sold in Munich and its surrounding counties include local news inserts; the SZ is well known for its daily frontpage column Streiflicht of 72 lines, published anonymously.
SZ Magazin, a magazine supplement Wochenende, featuring longer articles and short stories for the weekend The New York Times, selected articles. The TV programme and an event guide are only included in the Bavarian edition. SZ has published The New York Times International Weekly on Mondays since 2004, now a supplement on Fridays, an 8-page broadsheet insert of English language articles from The New York Times. Süddeutsche.de is the Internet portal of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The articles are made up of own contributions from the Süddeutsche.de editors, from texts that are taken over by the Süddeutsche Zeitung and from agency reports. On the 50th birthday of the Süddeutsche Zeitung launched on 6 October 1995 their internet edition under the name "SZonNet"; the project went from SZ-Text Archive under the direction of Schmitt from Hella. At the beginning there were no own editors, but selected contents of the print edition have been taken. 1996 wrote Oliver Bantle from the first journalistic online concept.
This Focus on science went online in the fall of that year with Angelika Jung-Huettl as an editor. They created the first journalistic content. Editorial responsibility lay with the leader of the SZ Science Department, Martin Urban. In the spring of 1998, the travel journal went into the net. Wenke Hess implemented it as an editor; the online content of Süddeutsche.de is maintained by 25 journalists. Circa 140 million clicks are received on Süddeutsche.de pages. Sued-café is the virtual lounge for SZ readers. During the third quarter of 1992 SZ had a circulation of 397,000 copies; the 1993 circulation of the paper was 304,499 copies. In the period of 1995-96 the paper had a circulation of 407,000 copies, its 2001 circulation was 436,000 copies and it was one of the top 100 European newspapers. In 2003 SZ had a circulation of 433,000 copies. In the fourth quarter of 2004, the paper sold an average of 441,955 copies; the circulation of the paper was 429,345 copies in the first quarter of 2006. During the
Private foundation
A private foundation is a charitable organization that, while serving a good cause, might not qualify as a public charity by government standards. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation in the U. S. with over $38 billion in assets. Most private foundations are much smaller. Two-thirds of the more than 84,000 foundations which file with the IRS, in 2008, have less than $1 million in assets, 93% have less than $10 million in assets. In aggregate, private foundations in the U. S. control over $628 billion in assets and made more than $44 billion in charitable contributions in 2007. Unlike a charitable foundation, a private foundation does not solicit funds from the public, and a private foundation does not have the legal requirements and reporting responsibilities of a registered, non-profit or charitable foundation. Not all foundations engage in philanthropy: some private foundations are used for estate planning purposes. One of the characteristics of the legal entities existing under the status of "Foundations" is a wide diversity of structures and purposes.
There are some common structural elements that are the first observed under legal scrutiny or classification. Legal requirements followed for establishment Purpose of the foundation Economic activity Supervision and management provisions Accountability and auditing provisions Provisions for the amendment of the statutes or articles of incorporation Provisions for the dissolution of the entity Tax status of corporate and private donors Tax status of the foundationSome of the above must be, in most jurisdictions, expressed in the document of establishment. Others may be provided by the supervising authority at each particular jurisdiction; the following foundations are set up under common law legal systems: Foundations were first introduced in The Bahamas in December 2004 following the Foundations Act. A private foundation, in the United States, is a charitable organization described in the Internal Revenue Code by section 509. A private foundation is a 501 exempt organization, it is defined by a negative definition:.
A private foundation is not a public charity. Neither is it a section 509 a supporting organization. Private foundations are subject to 2% excise taxes found in section 4940 through 4945 of the internal revenue code. Once a charity becomes a private foundation, it retains that status unless it follows the difficult termination rules of section 507; every organization that qualifies for tax exemption as an organization described in section 501 is a private foundation unless it falls into one of the categories excluded from the definition of that term. In addition, certain nonexempt charitable trusts are treated as private foundations. Organizations that fall into the excluded categories are institutions such as hospitals or universities and those that have broad public support or function in a supporting relationship to such organizations. In the United States, there are several restrictions and requirements on private foundations, including: restrictions on self-dealing between private foundations and their substantial contributors and other disqualified persons.
Violations of these provisions give rise to taxes and penalties against the private foundation and, in some cases, its managers, its substantial contributors, certain related persons. Violations of these provisions give rise to taxes and penalties against the private foundation and, in some cases, its managers, its substantial contributors, certain related persons; the following foundations are set up under civil law legal systems: The Austrian Private Foundation was last reformed under the Private Foundation Act in September 1993. The Austrian private foundation is considered a legal person having beneficiaries rather than shareholders or proprietors and may be established for any purpose. In Canada the Canada Revenue Agency is a branch of the Canadian government which regulates all foundations. Under Canadian law, since 1967, a private foundation is controlled by a single donor or family through a board, made up of a majority of directors at non-arm’s length, it is a registered charity with the Canada Revenue Agency.
A public foundation is governed by a board, made up of a majority of directors at arm’s length. A private foundation is not allowed to engage in any business activity, but it can operate its own charitable program. Canada Revenue Agency designates the application as a “charitable organization,” a “public foundation,” or a “private foundation,” depending on its structure, its source of funding and its operation; the Income Tax Act requirements are different, depending on the type of charity. The Liechtenstein Family Foundation was first introduced in 1926 and updated by the Act Reforming the Persons and Companies Act in 2008 which included a new Act on Foundations; the Mauritius Foundation was introduced following'The Foundations Act' of 2012. A foundation in the Netherlands is a legal person created through a legal act; this act is either a notarised deed that contains the articles of the foundation which must include the first appointed board. Foundation legislation was last reformed in 1998, giving rise to
Reichstag building
The Reichstag is a historic edifice in Berlin, constructed to house the Imperial Diet of the German Empire. It was opened in 1894 and housed the Diet until 1933, when it was damaged after being set on fire. After World War II, the building fell into disuse; the ruined building was made safe against the elements and refurbished in the 1960s, but no attempt at full restoration was made until after German reunification on 3 October 1990, when it underwent a reconstruction led by architect Norman Foster. After its completion in 1999, it once again became the meeting place of the German parliament: the modern Bundestag; the term Reichstag, when used to connote a diet, dates back to the Holy Roman Empire. The building was built for the Diet of the German Empire, succeeded by the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic; the latter would become the Reichstag of Nazi Germany, which left the building after the 1933 fire and never returned, using the Kroll Opera House instead. In today's usage, the word Reichstag refers to the building, while Bundestag refers to the institution.
Construction of the building began well after the unification of Germany in 1871. The parliament had assembled in several other buildings in Leipziger Straße in Berlin but these were considered too small, so in 1872 an architectural contest with 103 participating architects was carried out to erect a new building. After a short survey of possible sites, a parliamentary committee recommended the east side of the Königsplatz, which however was occupied by the palace of a Polish-Prussian aristocrat, Athanasius Raczyński. Work did not start until ten years though, owing to various problems with purchasing the property and arguments between Wilhelm I, Otto von Bismarck, the members of the Reichstag about how the construction should be performed. After lengthy negotiations, the Raczyński Palace was purchased and demolished, making way for the new building. In 1882, another architectural contest was held, with 200 architects participating; this time the winner, the Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot, would see his Neo-Baroque project executed.
The direct model for Wallot's design was Philadelphia's Memorial Hall, the main building of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Some of the Reichstag's decorative sculptures and inscriptions were by sculptor Otto Lessing. On 29 June 1884, the foundation stone was laid by Wilhelm I, at the east side of the Königsplatz. Before construction was completed by Philipp Holzmann A. G. in 1894, Wilhelm I died. His eventual successor, Wilhelm II, took a more jaundiced view of parliamentary democracy than his grandfather; the original building was acclaimed for the construction of an original cupola of steel and glass, considered an engineering feat at the time. But its mixture of architectural styles drew widespread criticism. In 1916 the iconic words Dem Deutschen Volke were placed above the main façade of the building, much to the displeasure of Wilhelm II, who had tried to block the adding of the inscription for its democratic significance. After World War I had ended and Wilhelm had abdicated, during the revolutionary days of 1918, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the institution of a republic from one of the balconies of the Reichstag building on 9 November.
The building continued to be the seat of the parliament of the Weimar Republic, still called the Reichstag. The building caught fire on 27 February 1933, under circumstances still not known; this gave a pretext for the Nazis to suspend most rights provided for by the 1919 Weimar Constitution in the Reichstag Fire Decree, allowing them to arrest Communists and increase police action throughout Germany. The burning of Reichstag had created fear in the capitalists of rise of communism in Germany; this furthered their policy of appeasement towards Hitler. During the 12 years of Nazi rule, the Reichstag building was not used for parliamentary sessions. Instead, the few times that the Reichstag convened at all, it did so in the Kroll Opera House, opposite the Reichstag building; this applied to the session of 23 March 1933, in which the Reichstag surrendered its powers to Adolf Hitler in the Enabling Act, another step in the so-called Gleichschaltung. The main meeting hall of the building was instead used for propaganda presentations and, during World War II, for military purposes.
It was considered for conversion to a flak tower but was found to be structurally unsuitable. The building, never repaired after the fire, was further damaged by air raids. During the Battle of Berlin in 1945, it became one of the central targets for the Red Army to capture, due to its perceived symbolic significance. Today, visitors to the building can still see Soviet graffiti on smoky walls inside as well as on part of the roof, preserved during the reconstructions after reunification. On 2 May 1945, Yevgeny Khaldei took the photo Raising a flag over the Reichstag, which symbolized the victory of the USSR over German
World Trade Center (1973–2001)
The original World Trade Center was a large complex of seven buildings in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. It was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. At the time of their completion, the Twin Towers — the original 1 World Trade Center, at 1,368 feet. Other buildings in the complex included the Marriott World Trade Center, 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC, 7 WTC; the complex was located in New York City's Financial District and contained 13,400,000 square feet of office space. The core of the complex was built with a cost of $400 million; the World Trade Center experienced a fire on February 13, 1975, a bombing on February 26, 1993, a bank robbery on January 14, 1998. In 1998, the Port Authority decided to privatize the World Trade Center, leasing the buildings to a private company to manage, awarded the lease to Silverstein Properties in July 2001. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda-affiliated hijackers flew two Boeing 767 jets into the North and South Towers within minutes of each other.
The attacks killed 2,606 people in and within the vicinity of the towers, as well as all 157 on board the two aircraft. Falling debris from the towers, combined with fires that the debris initiated in several surrounding buildings, led to the partial or complete collapse of all the buildings in the complex and caused catastrophic damage to ten other large structures in the surrounding area; the cleanup and recovery process at the World Trade Center site took eight months, during which the remains of the other buildings were demolished. The World Trade Center complex was rebuilt over more than a decade; the site is being rebuilt with six new skyscrapers, while a memorial to those killed in the attacks, a new rapid transit hub, an elevated park were all opened. One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 1,776 feet, is the lead building for the new complex, having been completed in November 2014; the western portion of the World Trade Center site was under the Hudson River, with the shoreline in the vicinity of Greenwich Street.
It was on this shoreline close to the intersection of Greenwich and the former Dey Street that Dutch explorer Adriaen Block's ship, burned to the waterline in November 1613, stranding Block and his crew and forcing them to overwinter on the island. They built the first European settlement in Manhattan; the remains of the ship were buried under landfill when the shoreline was extended starting in 1797, were discovered during excavation work in 1916. The remains of a second ship from the eighteenth century were discovered in 2010 during excavation work at the site; the ship, believed to be a Hudson River sloop, was found just south of where the Twin Towers stood, about 20 feet below the surface. The area became Radio Row. New York City's Radio Row, which existed from 1921 to 1966, was a warehouse district on the Lower West Side in the Financial District. Harry Schneck opened City Radio on Cortlandt Street in 1921, the area held several blocks of electronics stores, with Cortlandt Street as its central axis.
The used radios, war surplus electronics and parts piled so high they would spill out onto the street, attracting collectors and scroungers. According to a business writer, it was the origin of the electronic component distribution business; the idea of establishing a World Trade Center in New York City was first proposed in 1943. The New York State Legislature passed a bill authorizing New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey to begin developing plans for the project but the plans were put on hold in 1949. During the late 1940s and 1950s, economic growth in New York City was concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. To help stimulate urban renewal in Lower Manhattan, David Rockefeller suggested that the Port Authority build a World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Plans for the use of eminent domain to remove the shops in Radio Row bounded by Vesey, Church and West Streets began in 1961 when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was deciding to build the world's first world trade center, they had two choices: the east side of Lower Manhattan, near the South Street Seaport.
Initial plans, made public in 1961, identified a site along the East River for the World Trade Center. As a bi-state agency, the Port Authority required approval for new projects from the governors of both New York and New Jersey. New Jersey Governor Robert B. Meyner objected to New York getting a $335 million project. Toward the end of 1961, negotiations with outgoing New Jersey Governor Meyner reached a stalemate. At the time, ridership on New Jersey's Hudson and Manhattan Railroad had declined from a high of 113 million riders in 1927 to 26 million in 1958 after new automobile tunnels and bridges had opened across the Hudson River. In a December 1961 meeting between Port Authority director Austin J. Tobin and newly elected New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, the Port Authority offered to take over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad; the Port Authority decided to move the World Trade Center project to the Hudson Terminal building site on the west side of Lower Manhattan, a more convenient location for New Jersey commuters arriving via PATH.
With the new location and Port Authority acquisition of the H&M Railroad, New Jersey agreed to support the World Trade Center project. As part of the deal, the Port Authority renamed the H&M "Port Authority Trans-Hudson", or PATH for short. In compensation for Radio Row b
Newspaper
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business and art, include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local services, birth notices, editorial cartoons, comic strips, advice columns. Most newspapers are businesses, they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, advertising revenue; the journalism organizations that publish newspapers are themselves metonymically called newspapers. Newspapers have traditionally been published in print. However, today most newspapers are published on websites as online newspapers, some have abandoned their print versions entirely. Newspapers developed as information sheets for businessmen. By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspapers; some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record.
Newspapers are published daily or weekly. News magazines are weekly, but they have a magazine format. General-interest newspapers publish news articles and feature articles on national and international news as well as local news; the news includes political events and personalities and finance, crime and natural disasters. The paper is divided into sections for each of those major groupings. Most traditional papers feature an editorial page containing editorials written by an editor and expressing an opinion on a public issue, opinion articles called "op-eds" written by guest writers, columns that express the personal opinions of columnists offering analysis and synthesis that attempts to translate the raw data of the news into information telling the reader "what it all means" and persuading them to concur. Papers include articles which have no byline. A wide variety of material has been published in newspapers. Besides the aforementioned news and opinions, they include weather forecasts; as of 2017, newspapers may provide information about new movies and TV shows available on streaming video services like Netflix.
Newspapers have classified ad sections where people and businesses can buy small advertisements to sell goods or services. Most newspapers are businesses, they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, advertising revenue; some newspapers are at least government-funded. The editorial independence of a newspaper is thus always subject to the interests of someone, whether owners, advertisers, or a government; some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. Many newspapers, besides employing journalists on their own payrolls subscribe to news agencies, which employ journalists to find and report the news sell the content to the various newspapers; this is a way to avoid duplicating the expense of reporting from around the world. Circa 2005, there were 6,580 daily newspaper titles in the world selling 395 million print copies a day; the late 2000s–early 2010s global recession, combined with the rapid growth of free web-based alternatives, has helped cause a decline in advertising and circulation, as many papers had to retrench operations to stanch the losses.
Worldwide annual revenue approached $100 billion in 2005-7 plunged during the worldwide financial crisis of 2008-9. Revenue in 2016 fell to only $53 billion, hurting every major publisher as their efforts to gain online income fell far short of the goal; the decline in advertising revenues affected both the print and online media as well as all other mediums. Besides remodeling advertising, the internet has challenged the business models of the print-only era by crowdsourcing both publishing in general and, more journalism. In addition, the rise of news aggregators, which bundle linked articles fro
Blackletter
Blackletter known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the Danish language until 1875, for German and Latvian until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, sometimes the entire group of blackletter faces is incorrectly referred to as Fraktur. Blackletter is sometimes referred to as Old English, but it is not to be confused with the Old English language, which predates blackletter by many centuries and was written in the insular script or in Futhorc. Carolingian minuscule was the direct ancestor of blackletter. Blackletter developed from Carolingian as an literate 12th-century Europe required new books in many different subjects. New universities were founded, each producing books for business, grammar and other pursuits, not religious works for which earlier scripts had been used; these books needed to be produced to keep up with demand. Carolingian, though legible, was labour-intensive to produce.
Its large size consumed a lot of manuscript space in a time when writing materials were costly. As early as the 11th century, different forms of Carolingian were being used, by the mid-12th century, a distinguishable form, able to be written more to meet the demand for new books, was being used in northeastern France and the Low Countries; the term Gothic was first used to describe this script in 15th-century Italy, in the midst of the Renaissance, because Renaissance humanists believed this style was barbaric. Gothic was a synonym for barbaric. Flavio Biondo, in Italia Illustrata, wrote that the Germanic Lombards invented this script after they invaded of Italy in the 6th century. Not only were blackletter forms called Gothic script, but any other barbarian script, such as Visigothic and Merovingian, were labeled Gothic; this in contrast to Carolingian minuscule, a legible script which the humanists called littera antiqua, wrongly believing that it was the script used by the ancient Romans.
It was in fact invented in the reign of Charlemagne, although only used after that era, formed the basis for the development of blackletter. Blackletter script should not be confused with either the ancient alphabet of the Gothic language nor with the sans-serif typefaces that are sometimes called Gothic. Textualis known as textura or Gothic bookhand, was the most calligraphic form of blackletter, today is the form most associated with "Gothic". Johannes Gutenberg carved a textualis typeface – including a large number of ligatures and common abbreviations – when he printed his 42-line Bible. However, the textualis was used for typefaces afterwards. According to Dutch scholar Gerard Lieftinck, the pinnacle of blackletter use occurred in the 14th and 15th centuries. For Lieftinck, the highest form of textualis was littera textualis formata, used for de luxe manuscripts; the usual form littera textualis, was used for literary works and university texts. Lieftinck's third form, littera textualis currens, was the cursive form of blackletter difficult to read and used for textual glosses, less important books.
Textualis was most used in France, the Low Countries and Germany. Some characteristics of the script are: tall, narrow letters, as compared to their Carolingian counterparts. Letters formed by sharp, angular lines, unlike the round Carolingian. Ascenders are vertical and end in sharp finials when a letter with a bow is followed by another letter with a bow, the bows overlap and the letters are joined by a straight line. A related characteristic is the shape of r when attached to other letters with bows. In other scripts, this only occurred in a ligature with the letter o. Related is the form of the letter d when followed by a letter with a bow. Otherwise the ascender is vertical; the letters g, j, p, q, y, the hook of h have descenders, but no other letters are written below the line. The letter a has a straight back stroke, the top loop became closed, somewhat resembling the number 8; the letter s has a diagonal line connecting its two bows somewhat resembling an 8, but the long s is used in the middle of words.
Minims in the period of the script, do not connect with each other. This makes it difficult to distinguish i, u, m, n. A 14th-century example of the difficulty minims produced is, mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt. In blackletter this would look like a series of single strokes. Dotted i and the letter j developed because of this. Minims may have finials of their own; the script has many more scribal abbreviations than Carolingian, adding to the speed in which it could be written. Schwabacher was a blackletter form, much used in early German print typefaces, it continued to be used until the 20th century. Characteristics of Schwabacher are: The small letter o is rounded on both sides, though at the to
2013 German federal election
Federal elections were held on 22 September to elect the members of the 18th Bundestag of Germany. At stake were all 598 seats to the Bundestag, plus 33 overhang seats determined thereafter; the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union of Chancellor Angela Merkel won their best result since 1990, with nearly 42% of the vote and nearly 50% of the seats. However, their coalition partner, the Free Democrats, failed to meet the 5% vote threshold in what was their worst showing in a federal election, thus denying them seats in the Bundestag for the first time in their history. Merkel's party reached a coalition agreement with the then-main opposition party, the Social Democrats, to form a grand coalition; the SPD leadership conducted a ratification vote by their broader membership before the agreement was made final. In the last federal election in 2009, the Christian Democratic Union; the date of the German federal election is governed by the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal Election Law.
Article 39 of the Basic Law states that the Bundestag shall be elected between 46 and 48 months after the beginning of the legislative period. As the 17th Bundestag convened on 27 October 2009, the election was scheduled between 27 August and 27 October 2013. To avoid school holidays, a date in late September is chosen. Indeed, the Federal President ordered 22 September 2013 to be the election day upon the recommendation of the federal government. Polling stations were open from 8:00 to 18:00. According to Article 38 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, members of the Bundestag shall be elected in general, free and secret elections. In 2008, some modifications to the electoral system were required under an order of the Federal Constitutional Court; the court had found a provision in the Federal Election Law by which it was possible for a party to experience a negative vote weight, thus losing seats due to more votes, violated the constitutional guarantee of the electoral system being equal and direct.
The court allowed three years for these changes, so the 2009 federal election was not affected. The changes were due by 30 June 2011, but appropriate legislation was not completed by that deadline. A new electoral law was enacted in late 2011, but declared unconstitutional once again by the Federal Constitutional Court upon lawsuits from the opposition parties and a group of some 4,000 private citizens. Four of the five factions in the Bundestag agreed on an electoral reform whereby the number of seats in the Bundestag will be increased as much as necessary to ensure that any overhang seats are compensated through apportioned leveling seats, to ensure full proportionality according to the political party's share of party votes at the national level; the Bundestag approved and enacted the new electoral reform in February 2013. The Bundestag is elected using mixed-member proportional representation, as of February 2013 this means each voter has two votes, a first vote for the election of a constituency candidate, a second vote for the election of a state list.
The Sainte-Laguë/Schepers method is used to convert the votes into seats, in a two-stage process with each stage involving two calculations. First, the number of seats to be allocated to each state is calculated, based on the proportion of the German population living there; the seats in each state are allocated to the party lists in that state, based on the proportion of second votes each party received. In the distribution of seats among state lists, only parties that have obtained at least five percent of the valid second votes cast in the electoral area or have won a seat in at least three constituencies are taken into consideration; the minimum number of seats for each party at federal level is determined. This is done by calculating, for each party state list, the number of constituency seats it won on the basis of the first votes, as well as the number of seats to which it is entitled on the basis of the second votes; the higher of these two figures is the party’s minimum number of seats in that state.
Adding together the minimum number of seats to which the party is entitled in all of the states produces a total representing its guaranteed minimum number of seats in the country as a whole. In order to ensure that each party receives its guaranteed minimum number of seats when the seats are allocated using the Sainte-Laguë/Schepers method, it may become necessary to increase the number of seats in the Bundestag, it must be ensured that the seats are distributed to the parties in line with their national share of the second votes. Additional "overhang seats" are created to ensure that the distribution of the seats reflects the parties’ share of the second votes and that no party receives fewer than its guaranteed minimum number of seats. Balance seats are necessary to ensure that each party requires the same number of second votes per seat. Once the number of seats which each party is entitled to receive across the country has been determined, the seats are allocated to the parties’ individual state lists.
Each state list must receive at least as many seats as the number of constituencies which the party won in the state in question. Although the "chancellor-candidates" play a important role in electi
