BERLIN — The Bundestag is back — but it won't be business as usual.

When the German parliament meets for the first time on Tuesday after last month's general election, it will be bigger than ever. It is likely to be more bad-tempered and dysfunctional too.

A failure to reform Germany's electoral system, which adds extra seats so the final total reflects parties' overall share of the vote, means the assembly has a record 709 members. That makes it the biggest elected national parliament in the Western world.

And the arrival of MPs from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — which came third in last month's election — will fundamentally change the tone of debates.

“The question at stake is what will this do to the discourse," said Sophie Schönberger, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Konstanz. "What are the limits of what can be said inside a parliament?”

The bloated size of the Bundestag will significantly complicate day-to-day work, as “the more diverse and the larger a parliament is, the more difficult it is to control the government and to do parliamentary work,” Schönberger cautioned.

The supersized parliament will cost taxpayers an additional €75 million per year.

The Bundestag will also have a new man in charge — outgoing Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble will be elected its president. The parliament's longest serving member (he was first elected in 1972), Schäuble has been hand-picked by Chancellor Angela Merkel to manage the unwieldy assembly and keep the AfD in line.

If, as planned, Merkel's conservatives manage to form a governing coalition with the liberal Free Democrats and the Greens, the AfD won't be the main opposition party. That role will fall to the Social Democrats and their feisty new parliamentary leader, Andrea Nahles.

But with 92 members of parliament, the populists known for their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric are determined to make their mark.

“Of course, we will change the topics of the debates,” said a high-ranking AfD member of the Bundestag, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

AfD targets Merkel

One of the party's major goals is to set up a parliamentary committee investigating Merkel’s handling of the 2015 refugee crisis, the AfD official said.

In the election campaign, the party accused the chancellor of breaking the law by temporarily opening the borders for asylum seekers stranded in Hungary — a decision she still defends.

By themselves, however, the populists don't have the numbers to push through such a committee. They would need the support of other groups, who have said they will have nothing to do with the AfD.

The AfD official said his group reckoned 120 votes are necessary to establish the committee, meaning the party would have to win over 28 other MPs, which he called “doable."

However, the party would, in fact, need significantly more support than that, according to information from the Bundestag administration, supplied in response to a query from POLITICO.

A special regulation on investigative committees implemented four years ago is about to expire, the administration said in an email — which means the AfD will need the support of a quarter of the parliament to set up such a committee. In the new Bundestag, that would mean 178 members having to vote in favor.

Officials from other parties believe it will be difficult, bordering on impossible, for the AfD to collect the additional votes it would need.

Brain drain

But the mainstream parties are not just worried about the AfD's plans to change the agenda. They also fear losing experienced aides to the newcomers.

“The AfD is systematically trying to lure people away from us,” a senior Bundestag official from Merkel’s Christian Democrats said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

She described new AfD MPs approaching the staffers of Christian Democratic MPs who lost their seats, well aware that their work contracts expire at the end of this month.

“They don’t know how the Bundestag works — our staffers do,” the official said, mentioning “various instances” in which recruitment efforts by the AfD have been successful, particularly among older employees with just a few years left until retirement.

Meanwhile, the other new kid on the block has already suffered its first defeat — even before the assembly's first session.

Bundestag staffers gasped at the number of seats now filling the enormous chamber all the way to the back.

The liberal Free Democrats — who are returning to parliament after crashing out four years ago — lost a battle over the seating arrangements.

While all parties could agree on the AfD being seated on the extreme right-hand side of the assembly, neither the FDP nor Merkel’s conservatives wanted to end up next to them.

Following heated debates, outgoing Bundestag President Norbert Lammert decided the liberals should sit next to the populists. The FDP plans to raise the issue again after the first session but the spat was widely perceived as a black eye for the liberals' leaders, many of whom are newcomers on the national stage.

Regardless of the seating plan, the AfD has already made sure the Bundestag's inaugural session will create headlines for the party when it chooses its new line-up of vice presidents.

Like every group in parliament, the AfD has the right to nominate one MP for a vice president's post. It has picked 75-year-old Albrecht Glaser, who caused uproar earlier this year by saying Muslims living in Germany should lose their right to freedom of religion. Glaser argued Muslims' faith did not respect that freedom — a statement the other parties say makes him unfit for a senior role in parliament.

If Glaser, as expected, fails to get elected to the vice presidency, this could feed into a “victim myth” being fueled by the party, enabling the AfD to portray its supporters as victims of hypocritical barriers to freedom of opinion inside democratic institutions.

XXL Bundestag

Bundestag officials, meanwhile, have more mundane matters to worry about as they make arrangements for the new XXL parliament.

The have had to find new offices to house all the MPs, spread across Berlin’s Regierungsviertel (government district). A new 300-office extension is five years behind schedule due to leaks in a foundation “as porous as a flaky pastry,” according to the architect.

As dozens of workmen bustled about the plenary hall last week to reassemble chairs, Bundestag staffers gasped at the number of seats now filling the enormous chamber all the way to the back.

The supersized parliament will cost taxpayers an additional €75 million per year, according to an estimate by the German Taxpayers' Federation (BdSt).

Constitutional law professor Sophie Schönberger expects the issue of the bloated Bundestag to end up in front of Germany's highest constitutional court.

The problem is, “this will take its time,” she said, laughing, “up to four years, likely.”

That's when Germany elects its next parliament.