German election

Former Member

No clear winner in the German election, they need some osrt of coalition but not clear who yet........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1573570,00.html

Any thoughts on this, it certainly seems a mess. Seems the CDU lost a lot of their majority due to advocating neo-liberal economic reforms, including a flat rate tax......

With regards to Britain and the recent debate about whether we should adopt proportional representation, does this sort of scenario put you off PR politics?

Former Member

Mmm... so far as it doesn't descend into an Italian politics farce, a bit of coalitioning and compromising can actually be a good thing.

In the case of Germany this is probably welcome. The CDU will make some changes happen but not be allowed to go the full monty. Economic reform might be needed, but things like flat rate tax have nothing to do with aiding the economy and everything with benefiting the very rich.

All in all, quite a fuck up by the CDU to throw away the massive lead they had...

Former Member

In my experience early polls do tend to look more generous for the opposition though so I am not sure how much of a lead they actually had......

Flat tax is a ridiculous idea, they jabber about in the telegraph quite a bit, which should tell you something about how sensible it is.........

Former Member

Apparently it's the second worst result in CDU's history Still almost enough to govern though

Former Member

Indeed.....

I guess that the other three main parties behind the main two do not normally get the 10% or so that they got this time.

Apparently several of the party leaders have made various promises not to make alliances with such and such that will make forming a viable govt more difficult.......

Former Member

thats why i dont prefer PR system, since the theyre going to have to hammer out a deal behind closed doors, whilst here you get some idea of what youre getting

flat tax is what probably done it, its basically a big tax cut to the wealthy

Former Member

Quite. And like toady was saying, anything that gets trumpeted up in the Telegraph like the flat tax idea did should make alarm bells sound in everyone.

Former Member

IMO Germany needs strong leadership nowadays, and one wonders whether a coalition of the two parties whose leaders are both staking a claim to the position of Chancellor has to be a bad sign. Let's hope they can make some real changes in Germany, whatever the eventual outcome.

Former Member

PERHAPS itd work if the fair workable and practical which both parties have would be implemented, that'd solve a lot of problems

Teh_Gerbil

wheresmyplacebo wrote:

thats why i dont prefer PR system, since the theyre going to have to hammer out a deal behind closed doors, whilst here you get some idea of what youre getting

:yes:

Former Member

This election will turn out to be yet another example of how undemocratic more proportional electoral systems can be. And I believe Germany isn’t even totally proportional, I think it’s a mixed member system that they use.

More proportional systems frequently produce the kind of result we’re seeing in Germany. Coalition governments are anything but democratic in that to form a coalition parties have to compromise on much of their manifesto. Hence voters inevitably get quite different policies to the ones they originally thought they were voting for. Smaller parties also end up holding the balance of the power; a smaller party can end up holding the government to ransom for if it withdraws from the coalition the government will collapse. Similarly if we had a proportional system in Britain it seems inconceivable that Labour or the Conservatives could govern without the support of the LibDems, hence you could end up with a situation with the LibDems permanently in power holding up a Labour or Conservative coalition. Great for LibDem supporters perhaps but hardly democratic for a minority party to be permanently in office.

PR systems also inevitably lead to some pretty shady parties ending up in government as part of a coalition, you only need to look at some of the extremist religious parties that mainstream Israeli parties have had to woo to get a government together. If it comes to getting a coalition govt together in a PR system here I doubt there’s any party Lab/Con wouldn’t consider welcoming given how desperate Lab would be to cling onto power and the Cons to get it.

Oh and then there's history. How did Mussolini get elected? Hitler?