What’s the Secret of German Democracy?

Published on: 30 Nov, 2017
Updated on: 1 Dec, 2017

By Barbara Ford

Chair of the Guildford-Freiburg Association

Jamaica coalition? Grand coalition? Do you know how the German political system works?

My understanding of it was fairly hazy until I attended the lecture given on November 16 by Dr Emanuele Massetti of the University of Surrey (UoS) on “German democracy – how is it different?” for the Guildford-Freiburg Association in the especially appropriate setting of the council chamber of Guildford Borough Council.

Dr Massetti gave a clear explanation of what is a pretty complex set-up: the architects of the modern German constitution based their ideas on the so-called Weimar constitution of post-World War I Germany, but, in order to ensure that post-World War II Germany could never be hijacked by a potential dictator in the way that Hitler had done in 1933, they included in it entrenched checks and balances.

Dr Massetti explains the intricacies of the German political system

For example, some constitutional provisions, the “basic principles” such as human rights, democracy, federalism and the rule of law, cannot be amended at all, while amendment of the others requires a two-thirds majority.

Don’t forget the German Christmas Market

Federalism, one of those basic principles, presents interesting issues. Germany adopted the federalism model known as “co-operative federalism”, whereby the Länder (states) effectively pool their resources which are then shared according to need.

This was put under great strain by the re-unification of Germany in 1990 with six East German Länder all much poorer than any of the ten in West Germany. This great imbalance has been managed up to now by a series of temporary special arrangements, but the Western Länder are getting restive, and it is possible that Germany may move towards “competitive federalism” like that of the USA, where the states compete with each other for resources.

However, the German system has been a great success story, supporting Germany’s rise from total destruction to global economic power. There have been very stable parliamentary terms, with only three snap elections in seven decades, a multi-party system of between three and six parliamentary parties, mostly coalition governments, and generally non-confrontational dynamics.

That Jamaica coalition? This refers to the conventional diagram view of the current political parties in the Bundestag (equivalent to the House of Commons), whose currently 709 representatives are elected as to roughly 50% on a first-past-the-post basis, and 50% on a proportional representation party list basis (individual electors each have two votes, one for each type of representative).

The Jamaican coalition illustrated

They sit in the Bundestag in a semi-circle, with Die Linke, the extreme left-wing party, shown in deep red on the extreme left of the diagram, on their right the Social Democratic Party (SDP, roughly equivalent to our Labour party) shown in red, next the Greens, helpfully shown in green, then roughly in the middle the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in yellow, then further right the CDU/CSU (Angela Merkel’s party) in black and dark blue, with on the extreme right in bright blue, the populist right wing party Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

To form a government a coalition is needed since, usually under the German system, no party has an overall majority, and for some time after the September 2017 elections it looked as though Merkel might achieve a coalition with the FDP and the Greens – producing the same colour combination as the Jamaican flag.

However, the attempt seems to have failed and commentators are now speculating about a “grand coalition” of the two major parties, the CDU/CSU and the SPD.

Dr Massetti lectures in comparative politics at UoS, where his areas of research include ethno-territorial politics; devolution, federalism and multi-level governance; electoral and constitutional reforms; the politics of immigration; the politics of European integration/disintegration; and the political ideologies nationalism and populism.

All of those topics seem to have frighteningly more everyday relevance now than ever before, and perhaps on another occasion we could benefit from the charming Dr Massetti’s guidance towards an understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

For the slides Dr Massetti used for his presentation, see: https://tinyurl.com/yasvd8kp