Facing the Chancellery is the Bundestag, the German Parliament, housed in the renovated Reichstag building since the government moved back to Berlin in 1998.

The Bundestag ( Federal Diet ; ) is a legislative body in Germany.

In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house.

Norbert Lammert is the current President of the Bundestag.

Together with the Bundesrat, the Bundestag is the legislative branch of the German political system.

Although most legislation is initiated by the executive branch, the Bundestag considers the legislative function its most important responsibility, concentrating much of its energy on assessing and amending the government's legislative program.

One striking difference when comparing the Bundestag with the British Parliament is the lack of time spent on serving constituents in Germany.

A practical constraint on the expansion of constituent service is the limited personal staff of Bundestag deputies.

Members serve four-year terms ; elections are held every four years, or earlier in the relatively rare case that the Bundestag is dissolved prematurely by the president.

The second vote is cast for a party list ; it determines the relative strengths of the parties represented in the Bundestag.

If a party has gained more direct mandates in a Land than it is entitled to according to the results of the second vote, it does not forfeit these mandates because all directly elected candidates are guaranteed a seat in the Bundestag.

At the federal level, it forms a common ' CDU / CSU ' faction in the Bundestag with the CDU, which is frequently referred to as the Union Faction ( die Unionsfraktion ).

The FDP's parliamentary group has 93 members and is currently the third largest in the Bundestag.

Executive power is vested in the Federal Cabinet ( Bundesregierung ), and federal legislative power is vested in the Bundestag ( the parliament of Germany ) and the Bundesrat ( the representative body of the Länder, Germany's regional states ).

The President is elected every five years by the Federal Assembly ( Bundesversammlung ), a special body convened only for this purpose, comprising the entire Bundestag and an equal number of state delegates selected especially for this purpose in proportion to election results for the state diets.

Most Presidents have been members of the CDU as this party is usually the strongest in the Bundestag and also often in the states.

He or she is elected by and responsible to the Bundestag, Germany's parliament.

Federal legislative power is divided between the Bundestag and the Bundesrat.

The Bundestag is directly elected by the German people, whilst the Bundesrat represents the regional states ( Länder ).

In the event of disagreement between the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, a conciliation committee is formed to find a compromise.

The Bundestag ( Federal Diet ) is elected for a four year term and consists of 598 or more members elected by a means of mixed member proportional representation, which Germans call " personalised proportional representation.

has thus not been used in official terminology since 1945, though it is still found in the name of the Reichstag building, which since 1999 has housed the German federal parliament, the Bundestag.

The decision not to rename the Reichstag building was taken only after long debate in the Bundestag ; even then, it is described officially as ( Reichstag, seat of the Bundestag ).

Parties that gain more than 5 % of the second votes or win at least 3 direct mandates are allocated seats in the Bundestag in proportion to the number of votes it has received ( d ' Hondt method until 1987, largest remainder method until the 2005 election, now Sainte-Laguë method ).

The three smaller parties thus have more seats in the German Bundestag than ever before, with the liberal party FDP winning 14. 6 % of votes.

The President has a rather ceremonial role in creating a new Chancellor and a theoretically more significant role in sending the Bundestag home.

The number of Bundestag Deputies was reduced from 656 to 598 beginning in 2002, although under the additional member system, more deputies may be admitted if a party wins more directly elected seats than it would be entitled to under proportional representation.

This was partly due to the perception that the internal debate over the war in Afghanistan had been more honest and open than in other parties, and one of the MPs who had voted against the Afghanistan deployment, Hans-Christian Ströbele, was directly elected to the Bundestag as a district representative for the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg-Prenzlauer Berg East constituency in Berlin, becoming the first Green to ever gain a first-past-the-post seat in Germany.

In his first speech before the Bundestag as the Chancellor, Brandt set forth his political course of reforms ending the speech with his famous words, " Wir wollen mehr Demokratie wagen " ( literally: " We want to take a chance on more Democracy ", or more figuratively, " Let's dare more democracy ").

The office of president is open to all Germans who are entitled to vote in Bundestag elections and have reached the age of 40, but no one may serve more than two consecutive five-year terms.

It seems that Bundestag is more powerful than the Bundesrat.

As more allegations of possible corruption emerged, the prosecutors in Hanover, the capital city of the state of Lower Saxony, sought the Bundestag to lift Wulff ’ s immunity as President to investigate possible granting and / or accepting of undue advantages.

Adenauer managed to convince clearly more West German voters of his leadership abilities and economic and political success to easily win a second term, although he had to form a coalition government with the Free Democrats to gain a majority in the Bundestag.

The DRP was established in 1950 when the majority of the Deutsche Rechtspartei members of the Bundestag decided to establish a more formal party network under the DRP name.

The reunification of Germany resulted in a significant revision of abortion laws, which liberalized them in many respects, although leaving them more restrictive than the East German laws which permitted abortion upon demand during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. In the early 1990s, the German legislature ( Bundestag ) implemented a system where a woman having an abortion during the first three months of her pregnancy does not face legal sanctions if she undergoes mandatory counseling which has as one of its goals to present the case that the developing fetus is an independent human life, and obeys a 72 hour waiting period between counseling and the abortion.

As a member of the Bundestag without parliamentary group ( in German fraktionsloser Abgeordneter ) he fought for more rights, for example more talking time and representation in a subcommittee.

In the event that the Bundestag elects an individual for the office of chancellor by a plurality of votes, rather than a majority, the president can, at his or her discretion, either appoint that individual as chancellor or dissolve the Bundestag, triggering a new election.

Rather than adopting a constitution under Article 146 of West Germany's Basic Law, the Bundestag ( Paliamentary diet of West Germany ) used Article 23 of the Basic Law to allow the accession of East Germany territories to West Germany, therefore, placing East German territories under the fundamental authority of West Germany's Basic Law.

As these parties controlled a majority of votes in the Bundesversammlung ( an electoral college consisting of the membership of the Bundestag and an equal number of delegates appointed by the legislatures of each state ), the result of the vote amounted to essentially a foregone conclusion, but was closer than expected.

Because the Bundesrat is so much smaller than the Bundestag, it does not require the extensive organizational structure of the Bundestag.

Schäuble has always been elected to the Bundestag by means of winning an electorate seat, rather than through a list placing in Germany ’ s system of proportional political representation.

In the elections of 1983, Vogt was elected to the Bundestag, but resigned two years later because of the then prevailing Green rules of " rotation ", which specified that legislators should share their terms with others, rather than serving out a full term.

Former Justice minister Klaus Kinkel ( FDP ) had pleaded in favour of a " second chance "; former president of the Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse ( SPD ) declared that " expiation " has taken place, and Green member Antje Vollmer stated that they " have been longer in prison than any Nazi criminal.