German Politics Demystified

As part of my program, everyone is assigned a "Pate" from the German Bundestag who is supposed to be sort of a Godfather/Godmother.  I ended up with a super nice Pate, who is undoubtedly a fairly busy person, but has still made time to meet with me.  I recently went to a Neujahrsempfang hosted by the local chapter of my Pate's political party.  I tried to explain some issues in German politics to my mom and completely failed, so I felt the need to explain German politics to all my Americans-in-America readers out there.

The German federal government is in some ways similar to the US system, but in a lot of ways not.  To try to understand German politics, you really have to stop trying to compare the two at more than a basic level.  Legislative power is divided between the Bundestag and the Bundesrat and the chief executive body is the Bundesregierung.  There is also a federal constitutional court, but I don't know enough about that to talk about it.

The current chancellor of Germany is Angela Merkel (a woman who I admire for a lot of reasons that I don't feel like getting into here), and the current president is Christian Wulff (a man currently embroiled in an American-style financial scandal).  Americans should keep this terminology in mind.  The president is mainly a figurehead with some reserve powers, where the chancellor is the head of government.  It's pretty annoying to me when people call Angela Merkel the president.  It probably lays between "GEMA" and "Passive aggressive roommates who hide the microwave" on my annoying-ness scale.  Germans do not directly elect their chancellor, she/he is selected from within the Bundestag.  This is a nice chart explaining it that I found on wikipedia

Germans also don't consistently vote on the same day every time, the date is selected based on how many months it's been since the current Bundestag assembled and based on what the president feels like. Voting day always has to be on a Sunday or national holiday, though.  Germans can vote for one local person and also vote for their favorite party.  Roughly half the seats in the Bundestag are filled by directly elected local reps, the other half are filled from members of the parties.  The local person wins by getting more votes than everyone else (a plurality is fine).  The parties win simply by getting more than 5% of the votes.  Seats are assigned to each party based on what percentage of the votes they get.  The party then puts people in the Bundestag based on a list they have.  If they're award 10 seats, politicians #1-10 from the list get to go into the Bundestag.  Now you're probably thinking to yourself "Gee, what would happen if more local politicians were elected than seats were won by that party?"  That is called an overhang seat and in this case, the party would be allowed to keep whatever overhang seats it has, which means that particular Bundestag would have some extra people in it.  

Once you have your Bundestag, they go about electing the chancellor.  The president (who has already been chosen by the federal convention) nominates someone to become chancellor and then the Bundestag votes.  They are more than welcome to reject this person and select their own, but that has yet to happen.  

There are good and bad things to this.  One thing I really like is that smaller parties can easily enter the Bundestag under this system.  When all you need is 5% of the vote to be represented, more people are willing to take their chance voting for a non-major party.  If a larger party wants to get something passed, they need to partner with these little parties and form coalitions, so little parties do have a voice.  As one German joked to me "In Germany, when a lot of people defect from the SPD to the Greens, you get a red-green coalition.  In the US, you get George Bush."

One thing that is strange to me is how the parties tend to stick together.  In the US, what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat really depends on the state.  For example, it does not seem like a coincidence that the Republican governor who established universal healthcare in his home state was in Massachusetts.  That could happen here, but parties tend to have more uniform goals, which kind of weirds me out.

That's more or less all I have to say about that, but if any questions remain unanswered, feel free to ask privately/in the comments.