The members of the Bundestag are representatives of the German people as a whole, are not bound by any orders or instructions and are only accountable to their conscience.

The Reichstag delegates were elected by direct and equal male suffrage (and not the three-class electoral system prevailing in Prussia until 1918).

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor and through the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act of 1933 and the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, gained unlimited power.

After this, the Reichstag met only rarely, usually at the Kroll Opera House to unanimously rubber-stamp the decisions of the government.

Because West Berlin was not officially under the jurisdiction of the constitution, a legacy of the Cold War, the Bundestag met in Bonn in several different buildings, including (provisionally) a former waterworks facility.

[7] The former Reichstag building housed a history exhibition (Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte) and served occasionally as a conference center.

[citation needed] Since 19 April 1999, the German parliament has again assembled in Berlin in its original Reichstag building, which was built in 1888 based on the plans of German architect Paul Wallot and underwent a significant renovation under the lead of British architect Lord Norman Foster.

This check on executive power can be employed through binding legislation, public debates on government policy, investigations, and direct questioning of the chancellor or cabinet officials.

In 2004, the Petition Committee received over 18,000 complaints from citizens and was able to negotiate a mutually satisfactory solution to more than half of them.

This was a collaborative project involving The Scottish Parliament, International Teledemocracy Centre and the Bundestag 'Online Services Department'.

Before an electoral reform in 2023, the Bundestag nominally had 598 members, with the mixture of majority and proportional representation regularly leading to a large number of additional overhang and compensation mandates.

[13] In 2023, this was remedied with a series of changes that led to a fixed number of seats of 630 and significantly increased the proportional aspect; after this revised electoral law was confirmed by the Federal Constitutional Court with some modifications following constitutional complaints, it will be applied for the first time in 2025.

This is balanced in two different ways: If a member leaves the Bundestag during the legislative period, another candidate from the respective state moves into the Bundestag; in this case, constituency winners who were not initially considered (in the first scenario) are considered first (again in the order of their first-vote percentage results), followed by candidates from the state list.

In addition, the second votes of voters who have elected a successful independent constituency candidate are not taken into account when calculating the number of mandates (although they are for the 5% threshold).

Parties representing recognized national minorities (currently Danes, Frisians, Sorbs, and Romani people) are exempt from both the 5% threshold and the basic mandate clause.

The only party that has been able to benefit from this provision so far on the federal level is the South Schleswig Voters' Association, which represents the minorities of Danes and Frisians in Schleswig-Holstein and managed to win a seat in 1949 and 2021.

This changed the number of additional mandates of the Bundestag from 138 to 137, resulting in the FDP losing a seat.

The council is the coordination hub, determining the daily legislative agenda and assigning committee chairpersons based on Parliamentary group representation.

The council also serves as an important forum for interparty negotiations on specific legislation and procedural issues.

The Presidium is responsible for the routine administration of the Bundestag, including its clerical and research activities.

In the current nineteenth Bundestag, the CDU/CSU chaired ten committees, the SPD five, the AfD and the FDP three each, The Left and the Greens two each.

The Bundestag Administrations four departments are Parliament Service, Research, Information / Documentation and Central Affairs.

This leads to the result that any motion, application or action submitted to the previous Bundestag, e.g. a bill referred to the Bundestag by the Federal Government, is regarded as void by non-decision (German terminology: "Die Sache fällt der Diskontinuität anheim").

If the succeeding Bundestag convents with same or similar majorities like its predecessor, the parliament can decide to take over earlier initiatives of legislation in the same fashion to abbreviate the process, thus effectively breaking the principle of discontinuation by a pull.

The Reichstag plenary chamber is not determined by law as the location of the assembly, making it a facility of convenience.

After World War II, the Bundestag did not have own facilities to call home and had to convene in the Bundeshaus in Bonn together with the Bundesrat.

The assemblies met severe protest from the communist side, the last session even interrupted by Soviet aircraft in supersonic low-altitude flight.

The most distinctive assembly of the Bundestag outsite its regular chambers was on 4 October 1990, the day after German reunification.

The Bundestag assembled inside the Reichstag building in Berlin for the first time after 57 years, and remote from its then-regular home in Bonn.