Why the German elections matter to the rest of the world
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
No, he is the former president of the European Parliament. Also the German system is very different from the US and the chancellor is the most powerful political position in Germany, but not the equivalent to the US president.
The president of Germany would be more like the Queen in the UK: head of state with mainly ceremonial powers, but doesn't take much of a roll in actually running the country.
The chancellor was originally a subordinate position to the King of Prussia and later the German Kaiser. After 1918, the Kaiser was replaced by the president, who had a much more diminished role than the Kaiser did, and the chancellor undisputedly became the most powerful position.
In the US, the president is both of those positions rolled into one, with the exception of being elected by the states rather than by Congress.
Fortunately the German president makes his own speeches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_from_the_throne
Luckily Germany is no longer a monarchy, since 1918.
That's not really the point of the second vote. If we would only have the first vote we might have 599 representatives that only were able to get 20% of the votes in their district (the remaining 80% being spread across other candidates with a vote share of <20%). With the second vote we ensure that at least half of the seats are distributed proportionally across the parties and smaller parties have a chance to get into the Bundestag.
Very interesting; is there no limit to consecutive terms in the German government? Wonder what the pros and cons are to this approach (I'm posting from the US where the limit is two consecutive terms).
I think the norm is not to have term limits, but I could be wrong.
I guess this is one con argument for non-limited consecutive terms.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Convention_(Germany)
However, consider the rise of the National Socialists in Germany: In 1930, they first got a result > 3% in a federal election. By the end of 1933 all other political parties were banned. No practical term limit could have prevented this dictatorship, even though they never got more than 44% of the vote in a federal election, i.e. never enough to really change the constitution by democratic means. So we definitely know that term limits are not a completely reliable measure.
In Brazil, we didn't had reelections in the executive branch. 20 years ago the president bribed the Congress to change the Constitution so he could be reelected.
It has been a disaster!
The person in power would use all the government machine for his/her reelection. The election of a second term becomes almost a plebiscite of yes/no if the person must continue.
The renovation of the elected politicians has come almost to a halt. The emergence of new politicians were stifled. A real mess.
On the other hand, while the chancellor is the most powerful position in Germany it's still less powerful than the president in the US.
No. The second vote determines the overall number of seats in parliament that a party receives. Some of these seats are assigned directly based on the first vote. The remaining seats are filled in from lists of candidates that each party selects before the election.
If a party wins more seats through the first vote than it should really have based on the second vote, then that distorts the results of the second vote. Additional seats are created and assigned to the other parties in parliament to restore the proportionality of the seats based on the second vote (or at least reduce the distortion).
Things are a bit more complicated because each party selects a separate list of "fill-in" candidates for each state in which the party runs for parliament. So the national results of the second vote are broken down to the state level, compared to the first vote results of that state, and then "fill-in" candidates are picked for that state. A similar procedure is used for picking candidates for the additional seats that restore the proportionality of the second vote.