There will be 709 seats in the Bundestag.
709
That means 111 overhang and balance seats.
111 is insane, that has to be a record, right?
What's the maximum possible number of overhang/balance seats? Like is there even a legal limit? If not, what is the largest theoretically possible size the bundestag can get?
Before the Constitutional Court made them change the system the maximum overhang was 298 or however many constituency seats there are - un some impossible situation where independents won every direct swat or something silly. With the new rules that mandate national balancing seats to make sure that the Bundestag is proportional, the theoretical number is a lot higher. Unlikely for that to happen though although the more parties elected increases the chance of an overhang as the CDU and SPD will likely always collectively have the vast vast majority of constituency seats.
They could put a maximum in but then you have to work out what seats to take away - list seats would be the only option (since then some districts would randomly be deprived representation of no fault of their own) and then the smaller parties would challenge it for the same reasons that they challenged the old system. That is also the issue with all of the solutions - the old one that allowed parties to keep overhangs without balancing seats was thrown out for being unproportional, which would be an issue if you didn't want to grow the size of the Bundestag at all (that would basically allow parties to retain overhangs whilst the number of list members elected would be reduced to keep the Bundestag at the right size - that's kind of what we do here and it advantages the big parties a lot); and the other option (removing the overhang by taking those overhang seats away) would force the question of what seats to take away from a party that effectively has very few list members, and which would deny some districts representation. It's complex and there's no easy solution, the current one is probably the least worst if you value proportionality and local representation.
