The final outcome of Germany's elections last Sunday is going to be rather interesting. I'll attempt a brief explanation of the German national political process, since I believe I know more about it than the average American, and the mainstream American media doesn't seem to do a good job explaining it. I might get a couple of details wrong, but here's the gist. (Unexpectedly, the Wikipedia article is rather unhelpful.)
In Germany there's an elected president, but he doesn't do all that much. He's a figurehead, the head of state, kind of like the Queen of England but less famous. The head of government (government != state) is the Bundeskanzler. This is currently Gerhard Schröder of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). He was not elected directly; instead, his party was elected, and since he is the current head of the SPD, he's the chancellor.
German voters don't vote for a specific person for parliament; they vote for a party, of which there are many. Then the votes are tallied, and any party that received less than 5% of the vote is thrown out. Then the available parliamentary seats are divided between the parties, according to the proportion of votes they received. (Check out this flash graphic for a visual depiction of the vote results and how the parliamentary seats will be allocated.)
A party has to receive a certain percentage of the seats to become the ruling party. I think it's a simple majority, but I could be wrong. It is unusual that a single party achieves this on its own; therefore, the party receiving the greatest number of votes will tend to form a governing coalition with one of the lesser parties that more or less agrees with its principles. The two (or possibly three) together will have the requisite number of votes.
In the recent election, Germany's two largest parties, SPD and CDU (Christlich-Demokratische Union), received almost exactly the same number of votes. Either party could conceivably form a coalition with one or more of the smaller parties. It is also possible that they could form a coalition together, although I think pretty much everyone agrees that would be a bad idea. It would be like Republicans and Democrats trying to work in unison. Nobody would get anything done, and everyone would be unhappy.
A few minutes ago I saw an article in Die Welt that called the process Koalitionspoker—literally coalition poker.
That's a perfect description of what's going on right now. It will be very interesting to see what happens.
I have one final note. I referred above to the fact that any party receiving less than 5% of the total vote is thrown out of parliament. There is a very specific reason for this. The Weimar Republic in the 1920's had no such limit, and the strength of governing coalitions was weakened by the sheer number of radical splinter parties that had one or two representatives in parliament. The government's weakness made it vulnerable to takeover by Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
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