In Germany, two variants of mayors’ recall mechanisms are in place in the Länder. On the one hand, the fully fledged direct democratic variant, where the local electorate is given not only the right to vote on a recall vote (under certain procedural and majority requirements), but also to initiate the recall procedure (with a certain requirement of signatures petitioning the recall vote). Four Länder, Brandenburg, Sachsen, Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia, have adopted this mechanism for mayors. On the other hand, the recall procedure may be initiated indirectly in all the other Länder, except two, by the local council (deciding by qualified majority), while the local electorate only intervenes to finally vote on the recall motion as adopted by the council. In this variant, the recall procedure has been seen as a kind of mix of the representative democratic and the direct democratic principles, where the council “exercises some ‘representative democratic’ check on the local citizens in their exercise of their direct democratic power.”