Order of 27 January 2026 - 2 BvE 14/25
Otto-Wels-Saal
In an order published today, the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court dismissed an application of the AfD parliamentary group in the German Bundestag in Organstreit proceedings (dispute between constitutional organs) challenging the decision to allocate the so-called Otto-Wels-Saal, a meeting room in the German Bundestag, to the parliamentary group of the SPD instead of the parliamentary group of the AfD.
To the extent that it is admissible, the application is unfounded.
1. Art. 38(1) second sentence of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz – GG) does not entitle the applicant to the Otto-Wels-Saal as a meeting room.
The constitutional status of parliamentary groups does not include the right to be allocated a specific meeting room. The applicant’s opinion that the Otto-Wels-Saal, the second largest meeting room in the Bundestag, is equivalent to a silver medal to which it has a claim because it was the runner-up in the Bundestag elections, is flawed. The rights granted to constitutional organs under the Basic Law do not guarantee specific rewards based on the outcome of the election. Rather, they secure the possibility of participation in the decision-making process of the state organs.
2. The decision of the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat), to allocate to the applicant two other meeting rooms on the parliamentary group level of the Bundestag does also not violate the applicant’s right to equal treatment in conjunction with the principle of fair and uniform interpretation and application of the Rules of Procedure of the German Bundestag (Geschäftsordnung des Deutschen Bundestages – GO-BT).
a) The approach of the Council of Elders to allocate the meeting rooms by majority decision, and not by sequential selection in order of the size of the parliamentary groups, is tenable.
It was also allowed to interpret the Rules of Procedure (§ 6(3) second sentence Rules of Procedure) in a way that it only had to ensure that all parliamentary groups were allocated a room large enough to accommodate their number. Equal participation of the parliamentary groups in the parliamentary decision-making process does not require that the meeting rooms are allocated in sequence according to the size of the parliamentary groups, i.e. in a way that the second largest parliamentary group is allocated the second largest meeting room. Parliamentary groups only need to be able to exercise the functions necessary for their participation, e.g. finding consensus on their common positions. As long as they are able to do so, whether the meeting rooms allocated to other parliamentary groups are larger or smaller is irrelevant.
b) In this specific case, the assumption of the Council of Elders that the meeting room allocated to the applicant was suitable for its size, was justified. The submissions of the applicant do not include sufficient indication to assume that the decision was obviously unreasonable and arbitrary. Purely based on numbers, the meeting room allocated to the applicant has more space per member of the parliamentary group than was available to the members of the parliamentary group of CDU/CSU during the 18th parliamentary term.