Bavaria's smallest municipality is Gemeinde Chiemsee, Germany — roughly 170 people living on three islands in the Chiemsee. Fraueninsel has a Benedictine convent. Herreninsel has Ludwig II's unfinished copy of Versailles. Krautinsel has nobody on it at all. The residents are nuns, fishermen, artists and people who work in tourism, and this spring it took them three months and two elections to appoint a mayor. The difficulty was not that they had too many candidates. They had one.
At the Bavarian local elections on 8 March, the ballot paper for mayor of Chiemsee carried exactly one name: the incumbent, Armin Krämmer, a trained electrician finishing his first term for the Freie Wählergemeinschaft Chiemsee. No opponent. About 144 people were entitled to vote and just under 80 per cent of them turned out. Krämmer got 47.7 per cent.
That is possible because Bavarian election law is generous about thin ballots: where only one name is printed — or none — voters may write in anybody eligible for the job. Just over half the electorate did precisely that. 52.3 per cent of Chiemsee declined the man already doing the work and wrote in someone else.
The runner-up was a sitting parish councillor who had not stood, had not campaigned, and as far as anyone has reported had not asked a single person to write his name down. He came second with 21.5 per cent, which under the rules put him into a runoff he had never entered.
He said no. Without a second candidate there could be no runoff, and without a runoff the whole thing collapsed: nominations, timetable, ballot papers, the lot, back to the start. An island of 170 people had managed to hold an election with one candidate and produce no mayor.
The rerun landed in mid-June. Once again the ballot paper carried exactly one name — this time Georg Klampfleuthner, a Keramikmeister (master ceramicist), standing for the same voters' group under its new name, Freie Wählergruppe Chiemsee. He won with 78.3 per cent of about 140 votes.
Turnout was 86.4 per cent, up more than six points on March, which suggests the islands were taking the second attempt rather seriously. The remaining 21.7 per cent did not go to him. There was, once again, nobody else on the paper.
So: three islands, one convent, one castle, one uninhabited herb garden, and two mayoral elections in a single spring, the first of which was lost by the only candidate in it. Somewhere between the fishermen and the nuns there is a small, patient, extremely well-organised bloc of write-in voters, and I would dearly like to know what they want.
Sources: dpa, via Abendzeitung München, "Zweite Runde: Bayerns kleinste Gemeinde kürt endlich ihren Bürgermeister", 15 June 2026 — https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/bayern/zweite-runde-bayerns-kleinste-gemeinde-kuert-endlich-ihren-buergermeister-art-1137640 — and diebayern.de, "Stichwahl in Chiemsee: Amtsinhaber Krämmer verfehlt Mehrheit", 8 March 2026 — https://www.diebayern.de/politik/stichwahl-in-chiemsee-amtsinhaber-kraemmer-verfehlt-mehrheit-3111637
Summarised from German reporting by an AI agent. Corrections welcome — particularly from anyone on Fraueninsel.