Constituency · NW–05
Federal constituency 276 in north-eastern Baden-Württemberg. Nina Warken has won it directly in the federal elections of 2021 and 2025.
Territory
According to the Federal Returning Officer, constituency 276 consists of the Main-Tauber-Kreis and the Neckar-Odenwald-Kreis — two complete rural districts, without any partial municipalities or city boundaries to complicate the map. It is one of Baden-Württemberg's constituencies for elections to the German Bundestag and lies at the state's northern edge, bordering Bavaria and, at its north-western tip in the Odenwald hills, Hesse.
The Neckar-Odenwald district, administered from Mosbach, stretches from the Neckar valley across the Odenwald and the Bauland. The Main-Tauber district, administered from Tauberbischofsheim, follows the Tauber down to its confluence with the Main at Wertheim. Nina Warken's biography is anchored in both: she was born in Bad Mergentheim and went to school in Tauberbischofsheim in the Main-Tauber district, and she completed her legal traineeship at the Regional Court in Mosbach, the seat of the Neckar-Odenwald district.
Constituency boundaries are reviewed before each federal election by an independent constituency commission so that populations remain within permitted deviations from the average. Odenwald–Tauber has kept its composition of the two districts across the elections covered on this page, from 2013 to 2025.
This page does not reproduce population or turnout figures or vote shares; the Federal Returning Officer publishes the official structural data and results for each election.
Electoral system
Germany elects its Bundestag through a system usually described as personalised proportional representation. Every voter has two votes, and Members of the Bundestag reach parliament by one of two routes.
First vote · Erststimme
Cast for a named candidate in one of the 299 constituencies. The candidate with the most votes wins the constituency — a simple plurality, as in a British-style seat. This is the route by which Nina Warken entered the Bundestag in 2021 and 2025.
Second vote · Zweitstimme
Cast for a party's list in the state. The second votes decide how many seats each party receives overall — the proportional core of the system. Seats not filled by constituency winners go to candidates in list order. She entered the Bundestag through the Baden-Württemberg CDU list in 2013.
Until 2021
Every constituency winner took a seat. If a party won more constituencies in a state than its second-vote share justified, it kept these "overhang" seats, and other parties received balancing seats. The Bundestag grew accordingly — to 736 members after the 2021 election.
From 2025
The 2023 electoral reform fixed the Bundestag at 630 seats and abolished overhang and balancing seats. A constituency winner now receives the seat only if it is covered by the party's second-vote result in that state ("Zweitstimmendeckung"); where a party wins more constituencies than it has seats, its winners with the weakest results go without a seat.
The Federal Constitutional Court upheld the core of this reform in its judgment of 30 July 2024, while ruling that the five-per-cent threshold could not apply without the so-called basic-mandate clause, which therefore remained in force for the 2025 election. In the federal election of February 2025, according to the Federal Returning Officer, 23 constituency winners did not receive a seat because their party's second votes did not cover them. Nina Warken was not among them: the Bundestag lists her mandate in the 21st electoral term as a constituency mandate.
Her path
The type of mandate is recorded for each term in her Bundestag biography. Read in sequence, it shows the move from a list member dependent on party ranking to a constituency member with a mandate of her own.
Elected via the CDU state list for Baden-Württemberg into the 18th Bundestag.
Her first term ends with the 2017 election.
On 5 December 2018 she takes up the seat vacated by Stephan Harbarth, recorded as a list mandate. Under federal electoral law, vacated seats are filled from the party's state list.
Wins Wahlkreis 276 Odenwald–Tauber in the 20th Bundestag election.
Re-elected in the constituency for the 21st Bundestag.
Mandate and office
In Germany, unlike in some other parliamentary systems, ministers are not required to give up their seat in parliament. Most federal ministers are also Members of the Bundestag, and they continue to vote in plenary. Nina Warken kept her mandate when she became Federal Minister of Health in May 2025, and she keeps it as Federal Minister for Special Tasks and Head of the Federal Chancellery. Her Bundestag entry for the 21st term shows both: the constituency mandate for Wahlkreis 276 and her government function.
The combination has well-known tensions. A member of the government has far less time for the classic constituency tasks — local appointments, citizens' enquiries, visits to businesses and associations — and relies more heavily on constituency staff. The Chancellery role in particular is a coordinating office in Berlin with fixed weekly rhythms around cabinet. On the other hand, a direct mandate gives a member of government an independent electoral base and a continuous link to how federal decisions land in a rural region.
The issues that a district like Odenwald–Tauber raises — medical care in rural areas, hospital structures, transport links, the finances of small municipalities — overlap with the policy fields of her former ministry, but responsibility for them now lies with other ministers. Her local political roots are described on Local politics; the parliamentary record on Bundestag career.
