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September 27, 2021 - 10:09am
Election nights are always long. In Germany, where voters went to the polls yesterday, it is unlikely that we will know who Angela Merkel’s successor will be anytime soon. After sixteen years in office, it seems, the 67-year-old won’t be retiring just yet.
Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats (SPD) came in nearly neck and neck, but the SPD has edged ahead and has secured a narrow victory. This puts the smaller parties of the Greens (15%) and the Free Liberals (11%) in the position of kingmakers while the political fringes of Die Linke on the Left (5%) and the Alternative für Deutschland on the Right (10%) appear to be set for the opposition benches.
An array of coalitions is therefore possible to provide a governing majority to lead Germany into a new post-Merkel age. The constitution does not even prescribe that the largest party has to provide the chancellor. Helmut Schmidt, for example, West Germany’s chancellor from 1974 to 1982 retained his office after the elections of 1976 and 1980 even though his SPD came second in both elections. The Free Liberals acted as kingmakers on both occasions and denied the winning CDU/CSU a governing majority by working with their rivals. Now, both the Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and his Social Democrat rival, Olaf Scholz, could claim the right to be Germany’s next chancellor.
While this current result is unusually close, German elections rarely ever deliver clear results. The country’s complicated post-war election system is a hybrid of FPTP and proportional representation in which voters elect a local MP directly as well as opting for a political party. Directly elected MPs enter the Bundestag automatically and each party gets to fill up any remaining seats from its set list until it reaches the percentage of the party vote.
The proportional representation element is still strong, however, and usually means that coalition governments have to be formed. Only once in its post-war history has (West) Germany seen a party win an election outright. That was in 1957, when Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, was riding high on a wave of economic post-war recovery.
Once the results of the ballot are confirmed, the parties enter coalition negotiations, for which there is no timeline. For that reason, the existing government will have to stay as caretakers until the next executive is formed. However, the new Bundestag composition will have to convene within 30 days of the vote, which means a lame-duck chancellor and cabinet preside over a freshly elected parliament — an odd situation in which no significant decisions are usually made.
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SubscribeFunnily enough this electoral system (under the Basic Law) was actually devised by British officials during the post-war occupation.
We have the same setup in NZ and it has it’s pros and cons. The pros are the makeup of parliament represents that of the electorate so you don’t get majority governments that won less than 40% as is common in First Past the Post. The downside is that those MPs on the list aren’t directly accountable to the public, and you’ll have MPs lose their constituencies but still end up in parliament thanks to them being high up their parties list.
You do also get more coalitions, however this isn’t usually such an issue in NZ as you tend to have 2 main blocks that stick together, with Labour centre left always siding with the Greens further to the left of themselves, and National being centre right aligning themselves with ACT who are further right again. Germany appears to be much more fractured.