State ministers may also run for the city council. This has now been determined by the Administrative Court (VG) of Mainz (Ref.: 3 K 2/25 of 14 October 2025). The election challenge based on this was therefore unsuccessful.

In this case, four ministers of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate had stood as candidates for the city council of the state capital Mainz. The Rhineland-Palatinate Minister of the Interior was also elected, while the others were elected as successors. The plaintiff, also a member of the city council, considered the ministerial office and membership of the city council to be incompatible and therefore wanted to have the election declared invalid. However, the VG Mainz did not agree with him.

In the opinion of the court, there is no violation of the incompatibility regulation in the Rhineland-Palatinate Municipal Elections Act (Section 5 para. 1 no. 7 KWG). This stipulates that a city council member may not simultaneously be employed in a full-time capacity, for example as a civil servant or as an employee, with tasks of state supervision or with the supra-local auditing of the municipality. Ministers are not covered by this, as they are neither civil servants nor employees, „as they are in a special public-law official relationship that is not a civil servant relationship in the formal sense“, according to the court's press release. Furthermore, they were not directly involved in tasks of state supervision in this case. It is true that the Minister of the Interior heads the supreme municipal supervisory authority. However, the supervisory and service directorate, not the ministry, is directly responsible for supervising the state capital.