German Bundestag

On September 7, 1949, the first German Bundestag convened in Bonn for its constituent session. In the first Bundestag elections on August 14, 1949, 410 members had made it into the new parliament, eight of whom came from West Berlin.

The CDU and CSU together have 142 seats, followed by the SPD with 136 seats and the FDP with 53 seats. West Berlin MPs are also represented in the Bundestag. However, they are not entitled to vote due to Allied law. West Berlin did not have the status of a federal state. Only 28 women belong to the first Bundestag; eleven parties and two independent MPs are represented.

Paul Löbe, at 73 the oldest Member of Parliament and therefore the oldest President, opens the constituent sitting on September 7, 1949 in the former gymnasium of the Pedagogical Academy in Bonn, which serves as the plenary chamber. The SPD MP had already been President of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. He was a member of the new Bundestag as a West Berlin deputy and therefore had no voting rights. Löbe remains in parliament for the first term. Erich Köhler is elected President of the Bundestag in the first session with 346 votes in favor and 41 abstentions.

Many members of the CDU/CSU are in favor of a grand coalition with the SPD in view of the major challenges facing the young Federal Republic and the narrow lead of the CDU/CSU. However, the economic policy ideas are too far apart. The bourgeois coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the German Party (DP) sought by the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Konrad Adenauer, finally prevails. The SPD under Kurt Schumacher goes into opposition.

During the first legislative period of the Bundestag, 805 legislative initiatives are introduced, of which 472 are government bills, 32 are Bundesrat initiatives and 301 are Bundestag initiatives. A total of 545 laws were passed by the Bundestag during the first legislative period.

All sessions of the first Bundestag up to and including the penultimate session on July 3, 1953 were held in the plenary chamber of the Bundeshaus in Bonn, the building of the Pedagogical Academy, which had been extended since 1948. For its last session on July 29, 1953, it meets for the only time in its history in Cologne, in the large broadcasting hall of the radio station of the then Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, due to renovation work on the plenary chamber. The old plenary chamber of the Bundestag is demolished in 1987.