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The German Bundestag as a room full of seats

Between the two sittings the AfD grew from 83 to 150 seats and the SPD fell from 206 to 120, in a parliament that shrank from 735 to 630 seats.

Published chart
“Distribution of seats in the German Bundestag”
Published by
World of Statistics (@stats_feed), 6 Sept 2026
Data
Seats by parliamentary group, 2026 and 2021, as published

Every seat in the Bundestag as a dot, grouped by parliamentary group.

Data: World of Statistics (@stats_feed)
How to read it
1 / 4

Redrawn from the published figures. The recreation follows the original’s order and colours.

Chart typeParliament chartEvery seat of an assembly as one dot, arranged in a half-circle like the chamber and grouped by party, with the majority threshold drawn in.

Why this chart

  • It is a part-to-whole chart for a whole that is literally a room: anyone who has seen a parliament understands the shape before reading a word.
  • Seats are discrete. One dot per seat keeps the unit honest, where a donut would turn 630 people into a continuous slice.
  • The half-circle leaves a natural place for the question that matters most in a parliament, the majority threshold, as a single line.

What works

  • Party colours readers already know, so the legend is barely needed
  • A majority line turns the picture into an answer: who can govern?
  • CDU/CSU placed next to the SPD, so the governing coalition reads as one block that crosses the line
  • A table beside the chart gives exact numbers, so nobody has to count dots
  • A switch between sittings invites the comparison the post is about

What to watch

  • Blocks of similar size are hard to compare as dots: the Greens’ 85 and the Left’s 64 look alike. The table carries the precision.
  • The chamber shrank from 735 to 630 seats, so comparing counts across the two tabs mixes a change in size with a change in support. Shares compare fairly.
  • The order is not the chamber’s left-to-right seating. Parliament charts usually follow the political spectrum, so that neighbouring blocks are plausible partners.
  • The 2026 tab shows the parliament elected in 2025 as it stands in 2026; party groups change during a term, so a seat chart is a snapshot of a date.
  • Black dots for CDU/CSU nearly disappear on a dark background without an outline.

What we can learn

  1. 01Use a unit chart when the units are real: seats, people, votes.
  2. 02Draw the threshold that matters, a majority or a target, instead of leaving readers to compute it.
  3. 03Order the parts so the combination you want to discuss is contiguous.
  4. 04Compare wholes of different sizes as shares, not counts.
  5. 05Pair the picture with a table: the picture for the pattern, the table for the numbers.

The same data as a grouped bar chart

Bars compare each party’s change more precisely than dots, but the room, the majority and the question of who can govern all disappear.