completed by that deadline. A new electoral law was enacted in late 2011, but declared unconstitutional once again by the Federal Constitutional Court upon lawsuits from the opposition parties and a group of some 4,000 private citizens. Finally, four of the five factions in the Bundestag agreed on an electoral reform whereby the number of seats in the Bundestag will be increased as much as necessary to ensure that any overhang seats are compensated through apportioned leveling seats, to ensure full proportionality according to the political party's share of party votes at the national level. The Bundestag approved and enacted the new electoral reform in February 2013. The five percent rule and the basic mandate clause are further strong interventions because they completely reject the influence of entire political streams and their voters in the parliament. The five percent rule and the overhang () are in principle approved by the Federal Constitutional Court and the German jurisprudence. Suffrage Right to vote Suffrage is the civil right to vote. All German citizens over the age of 18 are allowed to vote (Art. 38, para. 2 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany), as long as they have lived in Germany for at least a three-month continuous period that was within 25 years of the election. According to Art. 20, para. 2, p. 1 all power emanates from the people, that is the people of Germany. Therefore, Art. 12 para. 1 of German Federal Electoral Law determines in accordance with constitutional law, that only Germans in the sense of Art. 116, para. 1 are eligible to vote. Excluded from suffrage are Germans, who have been deprived of active suffrage by a court in connection with a conviction because of delicts within the fields of treason, compromise of the democratic constitutional state, threat to the external national security, criminal offence against constitutional bodies, as well as criminal offence at elections and ballots, as well as indictable offences against the national defence. (§§ 13 Nr. 1 BWahlG, 92a, 101, 108c, 109i, 45 Abs. 5 StGB) for whom had been ordered a custodian with contained field of activity through interlocutory injunction (§ 13 Nr. 2 BWahlG) who find themselves in an asylum according to §§ 63, 20 StGB after having committed an illegal action being criminally incapable because of an order from the criminal court Eligibility to stand for election Every German