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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.

I'm Italian, used to our president mostly approving laws, commanding the armed forces (in theory, not in practice) and very few other things. And the best thing about our president is that it gets elected by the parliament requiring a very sensible majority. Thus pretty much all parties need to agree on one and they end up electing non-political figures (or politicians that have demonstrated high level of trust regardless of their party).

I think our system works great to be honest, and I already see the huge problems having an election-based president in Poland has with the government and president being from different parties and clashing with each other and the president vetoing for years a democratically elected government just to stir trouble.

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In practice, the system of government in the US most closely resembles the system of government in Britain prior to Robert Walpole becoming the first prime minister in 1721. American culture places too much emphasis on talking and not enough on listening - it's very easy to claim to have the best constitution in the world if you pay no attention to what anyone else has done in the past two and a half centuries.

Italian system is multi-party system with hybrid proportional representation. Very different.

The US operates on a "separation of powers" FPTP winner-takes-all system: once one party has lined up control of both houses, the Presidency and the Supreme Court, they can do almost anything, and (thanks to SCOTUS control) without regard to constitutional legality.

The last remaining bulwark is the Democrat states, which is why Federal troops have been sent in to intimidate them.

>president vetoing for years a democratically elected government

I guess the president is democratically elected too. Clashing between political parties is normal, and one can argue that a system which makes them limit each other is just fine. The current layout (parliament majority belongs to A, the president is of B) may reverse in future. And then the same people who now claim that president's vetoes should be abolished may start to see it in a very different light.

The problem is how difficult it is to remove someone once they are in power. In parliamentary democracies, it's simply loss of majority.

> I guess the president is democratically elected too.

That's a bug, not a feature though.

What happens in practice is that you get president and government from different parties and they carry their political fights on instead of governing. The president vetoes the government just for the sake of sabotaging it for his parties political gains. We've had already multiple instances of president and government having almost independent foreign policies, crazy. Trump, e.g., has de facto been ignoring our prime minister Tusk (which by constitution should decide our foreign policy) and has been talking only with our president. And that's not on Trump, but our crappy Polish constitution for allowing this mess.

On top of that, governments are based on holding a majority votes, presidents just stay there whatever happens and whatever chaos they create.

I think that there should be a politically, democratically elected government whose job is to make laws, and the rest of institutions should be as bureaucratic and boring as possible, with as little political involvement as possible.

Again, I really like how in Italy or Germany the president is not involved into law and policy making. Ever noticed how all the countries that deviate towards autocracy...are all presidential based?

One can argue that, if one doesn't look too closely how that "limiting of each other" tends to work in practice, and how it tends to work out in the end.

We have many, many examples of presidential republics, where both a president and a parliament have equal constitutional claim to represent the will of the people.

We see them reel from one constitutional crisis to another like a drunken sailor.

The US has fared comparatively well, as presidential republics go - so far. I don't know why, maybe because some groups have been more willing to yield to preserve the prestige of the institution as a whole. Given that it's the most prestigious presidential republic by a mile, that wouldn't be so surprising.

But it makes sense then, that this subservience will eventually get pushed further and further, until everything breaks.

It's no coincidence that most of the countries that at some point become more autocratic are presidential republics.

Linz has argued that presidential republics have the following issues:

- dual democracy legitimacy (both president and legislature claim popular mandate)

- rigidity (fixed term rather than parliamentary approval prevents adaptation to crises)

- winner take all logic (total exclusion of opposition from power)

- personalization of power (authority concentration)

Further, the Carnegie Endowment in 2025 found that autocratic transitions occur at "striking speed" in presidential systems.

[1] https://kellogg.nd.edu/sites/default/files/old_files/documen...

> To me, an European, what's troubling about US is the amount of power the presidential office has. It's reaching disturbing levels under this administration.

It has. No US president ever went this far before. Past US presidents have made remarks such as "If I'd tried to do that, I would have been impeached".

Congress has more power than the President but the current members of congress are not inclined to use it against Trump. Or at all.

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