Constitutional Referendum in Germany — Country Report

Abstract

Germany belongs to one of the few countries in the EU, which have so far no experience of national-wide referenda. The Basic Law (federal constitution)1 provides explicitly only for referenda on a federal level on changes to boundaries of the Länder2 thereby restricting the right to participate to those residing in the affected Länder. The shadowy existence of referenda on a federal level is mainly accredited to the historical experiences with plebiscites. Hence, after having classified the notion “referendum” against “plebiscite”, “petition for a referendum”, “consultative referendum”, etc. in order to guarantee a uniform understanding of the relevant terms in this report (II.), a closer look into Germany’s history of constitutional referenda will be the starting point of this paper (III.). It is followed by the analysis of the provisions in the basic law that allows for a direct involvement of the people (IV.). Although the federal level does not offer many opportunities for direct democracy, Germans are not inexperienced in directly influencing governments through referenda. On the sub-level, all German Länder offer a quite developed direct involvement of their people in governing their respective areas. Hence, it seems to be worthwhile to provide a short insight into the options of a constitutional referendum of the Länder (V.).