Germany in the register

Rules and sources

Disclosure threshold

> €50,000 per donation (> €35,000 from 5 March 2024)

Legal framework

Parteiengesetz (PartG, Political Parties Act), in particular §§ 18-19a (public funding), §§ 23-24 (annual accounts) and § 25 (donations). Donors are published by name and address in the annual accounts (Rechenschaftsbericht) if their contributions exceed a combined 10,000 EUR per year; individual donations above 35,000 EUR (50,000 EUR before 5 March 2024, 11th Amendment Act) must be reported immediately to the President of the Bundestag, who publishes them promptly as a Bundestagsdrucksache (parliamentary paper). Anonymous donations are allowed only up to 500 EUR; foreign donations (with EU exceptions), donations from public bodies and donations from parties expecting an advantage are prohibited. Oversight: the President of the German Bundestag (Bundestagsverwaltung). There are no separate campaign accounts; election spending appears in the annual accounts, which are published roughly 18-24 months in arrears.

Currency

EUR

Sources

• Donors above 10,000 EUR in party annual accounts (Rechenschaftsberichte), via LobbyControl Parteispenden-DatenbankDeutscher Bundestag (Bundestagsdrucksachen); digitised by LobbyControl e.V. (Lobbypedia) · 2000-2023 · 23,558 rows
• Rechenschaftsberichte 2024 – donors above 10,000 EUR (§ 25(3) PartG lists), official BundestagsdrucksachenDeutscher Bundestag (Bundestagsdrucksachen 21/4150, 21/4185, 21/5235) · 2024 · 2,457 rows
• Parteispenden über 35.000 € / 50.000 € (immediately reported large donations)Deutscher Bundestag (President of the Bundestag) · 2002-2026 (reports from July 2002 to the list page retrieved on 2026-09-28) · 1,065 rows
• Festsetzung der staatlichen Mittel (annual determination of state party funding)Deutscher Bundestag, Verwaltung, Referat PM 3 · 2007-2023 · 335 rows

Caveats

• The donation sources overlap: donations above 35,000/50,000 EUR appear itemised in Parteispenden über 35.000 € / 50.000 € (immediately reported large donations) AND inside the per-donor annual totals of the annual-account sources (Donors above 10,000 EUR in party annual accounts (Rechenschaftsberichte), via LobbyControl Parteispenden-Datenbank 2000-2023, Rechenschaftsberichte 2024 – donors above 10,000 EUR (§ 25(3) PartG lists), official Bundestagsdrucksachen 2024). Do not add the large-donation source to the annual-account sources.
• Donors above 10,000 EUR in party annual accounts (Rechenschaftsberichte), via LobbyControl Parteispenden-Datenbank (Lobbypedia, 2000-2023) and Rechenschaftsberichte 2024 – donors above 10,000 EUR (§ 25(3) PartG lists), official Bundestagsdrucksachen (official Drucksachen, 2024) are the same kind of data - the § 25(3) PartG list of everyone whose donations, membership fees and mandate-holder levies to the party (all branches) exceeded 10,000 EUR in the year - under two keys because they come from different transcriptions; they do not overlap in years and can be read as one series. Rows are annual totals per donor per national party and carry no date.
• Donors above 10,000 EUR in party annual accounts (Rechenschaftsberichte), via LobbyControl Parteispenden-Datenbank comes from LobbyControl's manual transcription of scanned Bundestag PDFs, not from the official files directly; minor transcription errors are possible. Donor localities are as recorded there (town only).
• Rechenschaftsberichte 2024 – donors above 10,000 EUR (§ 25(3) PartG lists), official Bundestagsdrucksachen (2024) was read from scanned Drucksachen: every list page was OCR'd twice (the PDF's own text layer and tesseract); amounts are kept only when both readings agree digit for digit, or after a check by eye on the page image; names and towns were chosen between the two readings by rules (vocabulary of earlier donor names, postcode-town majority) and 16 names were corrected by eye. Residual spelling errors in names are possible (e.g. missing diacritics). A cross-check against the Bundestag large-donation list found every 2024 large donor of these parties in the annual lists with at least the reported amount, except 'Geschwister Oetker Beteiligungen KG' (CDU, not found under that name) and VBM->CSU (341,000 EUR reported as large donations, 41,000 EUR in the CSU list).
• 2024 annual-account lists: covered are the Bundestag parties (Drs. 21/4150), the other parties entitled to state funding (21/4185) and the first volume of the other parties (21/5235, 16 parties); accounts of further small parties (e.g. MLPD, DKP, WerteUnion) had not been published as Drucksache at ingest time. Addresses in the lists include office addresses (c/o parliament) of mandate holders; only postcode and town are kept. The FDP marks mandate holders whose address is an alternative (office) address; the CDU list includes company-register style names as printed.
• Donor kind for the Bundestag lists is inferred: legal-form suffixes / association keywords, academic titles, or a matching 'natural person' entry in the Lobbypedia data; otherwise 'unknown'. Lobbypedia 'juristische Person' without a recognisable legal form is 'other'. In the 2024 lists names in 'Surname, First name' form (or with MdB/MdL) are 'individual'.
• Street addresses published by the Bundestag were removed; only postcode and town are kept. donor country is DE for 5-digit postcodes without a country prefix, otherwise from the plate prefix or country line.
• Membership fees, mandate-holder contributions (Mandatsträgerbeiträge) and donations below 10,000 EUR are not itemised in Germany.
• Public funding 2024 and 2025 (finanz_24.pdf, finanz_24-1-.pdf, finanz_25.pdf) publish the Gesamtübersicht only as images; not OCR'd. Public funding before 2007 is not published on that page. Amounts are the final determined entitlement per party (federal + Land share) as of each determination; later corrections are not reflected.
• Large donations July 2002-2008 were parsed from the monthly Drucksache PDFs (text PDFs, no OCR): the receipt date is empty when only a period is given (e.g. BMW free car use '01.01. bis 31.12.'); one FDP entry of 2005 was published only as '> 50,000 EUR' and is recorded as 50,000 (lower bound). When a later Drucksache re-announced a donation cumulatively (FDP/Möllemann 2002, AGFG/Dr. Rath companies 2007-2008), only the increment over the earlier publication is kept and one pure re-announcement is dropped, so that sums are not inflated; the published figure is quoted in description.
• Some Bundestag entries are approximate ('ca.') or corrected amounts; this is flagged in description. Receipt date = first date given when several are listed.
• The party AGFG is 'Allianz für Gesundheit, Frieden und soziale Gerechtigkeit' (earlier ingest: wrongly expanded as 'Arbeitsgemeinschaft Freier Gemeinschaften', kept as alias). BSU (Bürgerliche Soziale Union) was published by the Bundestag 'as a precaution' without deciding whether it is a party.
• the party accounts data not available: income/expenditure totals are only in the Rechenschaftsberichte Drucksachen (long, partly scanned PDFs, 1968-2024) and were not ingested.
• Lobby-register donations (Lobbyregister) are donations TO lobby organisations, not to parties, and were not ingested.
• Second pass (checked 2026-09-29, not part of the ingested donations): (a) donations and other benefits to individual Bundestag members are published on each member's page under 'Spenden und sonstige Zuwendungen für die politische Tätigkeit' (§ 4 Verhaltensregeln, Anlage 1 GO-BT: notification above EUR 5,000 per year, publication above EUR 10,000 per donor and year; the published entries are mostly in-kind items such as travel costs paid by foundations or seconded fellows); the 21st and 20th terms (about 640 + 770 member pages, 43 + 116 members with entries) were crawled but are not yet in the donations data (see RESUME.md); (b) Hessen Landtag: the 133 member pages of the 21st term show no donation entries (https://hessischer-landtag.de/abgeordnete); (c) NRW Landtag: member pages have no donation category and the Wählergruppentransparenzgesetz overviews (Drs. 18/7859, 18/14009, 18/17738) give only aggregate 'Zuwendungen' per local voter group and year, without donors; (d) the Bundestag page on § 31c PartG publication violations is explanatory only, no cases named.
• Not yet ingested: the donor lists (§ 25(2) PartG, DM, threshold about DM 20,000) of the annual accounts 1983-1999 exist in the Bundestag Drucksachen 10/2172 ... 14/5725 (OCR text PDFs) and are cached in the downloaded files/rb_old/; accounts of the 'other parties' are published in several volumes over up to three years (2023: Drs. 20/14935, 21/1205, 21/5230; 2024: only 21/5235 so far) and it was not verified whether the Lobbypedia series 2018-2023 contains the late volumes.