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Comment by notkaiho | Hacker News Reader

Except unlike the British Monarchy, one is not born into the position and cannot expect to gain the position purely by blood. The position itself may be largely ceremonial, but the holder of the post is recognised as an elder statesperson in their own right for their career prior to the presidency.

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You can still get duffers in such jobs as often a candidate is put forward who's agreeable all parties and as such can be the lowest common denominator who won't rock the boat.

Term limits, though. :)

Which is interesting, because those aren't common in Germany. For the Bundespräsident, they have another interesting thing: there are no limits on how many terms you serve, you just can't serve more than two in a row.

But that's also true for e.g. the US and russian presidents, no? Except those actually hold real power.

In practise, most german presidents will just be way too old four years after they leave office to be a viable candidate, and it looks a bit absurd for them to be pushed back into the office, exactly because there's very little real power.

I don't think it's possible for the US president, they are limited to 10 years (two terms + two years if they were vice president and became acting president) which, afaik, is per life-time.

I agree though, it's not an issue, precisely because the German president has historically not acted partisan (even though he's usually a member of a party) and not be involved in day-to-day politics, so it's not too hard to find somebody that everybody can agree on. This may change if the office becomes more politicized, but I doubt we'll see somebody get re-elected after having paused for a term.

That's correct - a US president cannot serve more than two terms. If they were already acting as President for two or more years, they can only be elected to the position once. This was codified in the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution.

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