The blue seats in Germany's parliament are being moved to match voters' choices

A worker removes a seat during the set-up for the new seating of the federal parliament Bundestag at the Reichstag building in Berlin, Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

BERLIN — German voters have had their say. Now their verdict is being turned into reality underneath the glass dome of Berlin’s landmark Reichstag building.

Workers on Wednesday rearranged the blue seats in the chamber of the lower house of parliament, or Bundestag.

After each election, the chairs and desks are unscrewed and put back into place to reflect the results, with aisles demarcating the seats held by different parties.

After the Feb. 23 election, there will be five groups in the new parliament. Lawmakers from the strengthened far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany will sit at one end of the semicircle of seats, with the Left Party at the other end and center-right and center-left parties in between.

There are two parties fewer than in the old parliament after the pro-business Free Democrats and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance lost their seats last month. The total number of lawmakers also fell to 630 from 733 because of a change to electoral laws.

The Bundestag sat in Bonn for half a century after the birth in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany — then West Germany, now the reunited country. In 1999, nearly a decade after reunification, lawmakers moved to the Reichstag in Berlin, which had been transformed with the glass cupola designed by British architect Norman Foster.

The 21st Bundestag will hold its first session Tuesday. It’s unclear when it will elect a new chancellor, since election winner Friedrich Merz is still in talks to form a coalition government.

But it is expected to elect its new speaker. The strongest party traditionally takes that job, and Merz’s conservative Union bloc has nominated prominent lawmaker Julia Klöckner.

Unusually, the outgoing Bundestag worked until the very last moment. On Tuesday, it approved plans to loosen Germany’s strict debt rules to enable higher defense spending and set up an enormous fund for investment in its creaking infrastructure.

Outgoing speaker Bärbel Bas thanked the workers who would rearrange the chamber “in overtime and at the weekend” as she closed Tuesday’s special session.