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German election infoboxes tend to be quite bulky with a lot of information. The 2017 election infobox is an obvious example - it's quite overwhelming and it can be difficult to parse what's important and what's not, especially for a less informed viewer. With the election coming up, a lot of eyes are going to be on this page, and the infobox could really do with slimming down to exclude superfluous information. There are two particular data points that in my opinion are pretty much irrelevant and could be removed without issue.

Firstly, the "leader since" line is essentially useless. Since lead candidates are often not the actual leaders of the party, these dates usually correspond to the announcement or formal selection of the candidates for the election itself. To tell the average viewer that Olaf Scholz was selected as SPD lead candidate in August 2020 is essentially meaningless. It says nothing about his senior role within the SPD which stretches back years, and if anything serves to mislead by suggesting that he's a relative newcomer. The same can be said for Bartsch of the Left or even Weidel of the AfD. The distinction between leader and lead candidates also means that footnotes are required to clarify which in itself is a headache for readers, especially in the case of dual candidacies.

Secondly, the "leaders' seat" line. This is potentially even less useful than "leader since" as the lead candidates are always at the top of their respective state lists and thus all but guaranteed to enter the Bundestag. Their specific constituency or state is of very little consequence. This is also the most space-filling of any data point in the infobox thanks to the long names of the constituencies and state party lists combined with dual candidacies. At standard resolution, the 2017 infobox dedicates eight whole lines of text just to listing names of the leaders' various constituencies and states, wasting space and distracting from the more important data around it. There are also a copious number of footnotes listing the constituencies each leader ran in unsuccessfully (or is running in, if pre-election), which adds a great degree of visual clutter and provides very little relevant information - especially now that we have dedicated results pages with a section for leaders' races.

In my view there's very little reason to keep these two lines, and removing them would go a long way to slimming down what are already some of the lengthiest election infoboxes on the site, improving readability. I'll leave this here for a few days and go ahead if there are no objections. Erinthecute (talk) 06:06, 12 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The leaders' seat section might not be important for most of the candidates, but that doesn't mean it may be in some cases. Kohl losing his seat in 1998 was seen as dramatic, Laschet might lose election on the list this year and the "leaders' seat" in the case of Baerbock and Scholz, who are both running in the Potsdam-PM constituency, has received a lot of press coverage. It is also noteworthy for the fact that some leaders come from and run in East Germany. Or the fact that on 4 (Strauß, Rau, Lafontaine, Stoiber) occasions, a leader did not accept their mandate. As far as "leader since" goes, it is actually very important because otherwise you would think that Scholz was SPD leader or Schröder was SPD leader in 1998. The fact that Scholz isn't SPD leader has become quite the important topic and therefore it makes sense to mention it in the infobox. In addition, I don't think a long infobox is not necessarily less readable. KamikazeMatrix26Juni (talk) 19:42, 15 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of the infobox is to be a concise explanation of the results. I don't think listing of the direct mandates warrants inclusion since it's bordering on trivia in many cases, especially considering the amount of screen space it takes up compared to vastly more important information like seats, votes, swings, etc. As for the "leader since", in the 2021 election the lead candidates are denoted as "candidates", so it's actually the inclusion of the "leader since" value that causes confusion here (and "leader's seat", for that matter). For previous elections listing "leader", "leader since", and "leader's seat", there is clearly a very strong impression that the lead candidates are the leaders until you check the footnotes. Swapping out "leader" with "candidate" and removing "leader since" and "leader's seat" would solve this. Erinthecute (talk) 23:37, 15 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Erin on this. A party leader losing their seat is important, but is the kind of thing that should be in the text of the introduction – it doesn't need to be in the infobox, nor does how long a leader has been in office. Number 57 11:52, 16 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Lord Stephenson: So what is there to discuss about implementing more recent pictures, if those pictures have the same quality? Time of Use of those older pictures is IMO not an argument to use old pictures even further. ----LennBr (talk) 21:18, 23 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]