A guy running a country (Germany) with 11% unemployment almost gets re-elected but because of the proportional representation system the 'winner' is screwed and even the communists got 8% of the seats in government!
So fair but so faulty
Germany's proportional representation system has brought political stalemate and confusion, writes Europe correspondent Peter Wilson
24sep05
BACK in May there was much tut-tutting in Britain when national elections exposed a terrible weakness in the nation's democracy.
Tony Blair's Labour Government comfortably won a third straight parliamentary majority despite winning only just over one-third of the vote, making it the least representative majority government in the nation's history.
Flash forward 19 weeks and eastward 300km to Germany, where many people would love to have the same dreadful flaw. If Germany's political system also gave a disproportionate number of seats to the winners then Europe's largest nation might now have a government instead of the confusing muddle it faces.
The British elections saw Labour win 35.2 per cent of the vote to the Conservatives' 32.3 per cent, with the rest going to smaller parties.
The first past the post system in single-seat electorates translated the Labour vote into 55.2 per cent of House of Commons seats for Blair, enough to do almost as he pleases in a system with few checks and balances -- Britain has no state governments and an unelected upper house (the House of Lords) that lacks any electoral legitimacy.
Last weekend in Germany, Angela Merkel, who was trying to become the first female chancellor, led her Christian Democratic Union to exactly the same vote as Blair's Labour, 35.2 per cent. Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats gathered 34.3 per cent.
But like New Zealand's electoral system and unlike Australia's, Germany's fairer system for distributing seats means the proportion of votes is closely reflected in the number of seats each party receives in the Bundestag, which elects the chancellor.
Merkel's CDU reaped only 36.7 per cent of the seats while the Social Democrats got 36.2 per cent. Germany's greatest political stalemate for decades was compounded by the performance of the new Left Party, a combination of former communists from eastern Germany and left-wing defectors from the Social Democrats in the west, which won 8.7 per cent of the vote. By crossing a 5 per cent threshold for official party recognition, the Left Party earned 54 of the 613 seats in the Bundestag, leaving the evenly poised centre-left and centre-right coalitions unable to put together a majority.
The outcome is confusion and inertia, not just for Germany but for Europe. Tentative coalition talks in the past few days have shown that it might be impossible to bring together ideological opponents into a government capable of pursuing a coherent agenda. Schroeder's allies in the Green Party say the conservatives' attempts to woo them into a coalition are unlikely to get anywhere. Merkel's ally, the pro-business Free Democratic Party, says Schroeder's advances to them are so unwelcome they are more "a case of stalking" than romance.
For much of Germany's post-war history none of this might have mattered too much. The stunning success of the nation's economy and society during the past 50 years meant that at most times it could have coped quite easily with a few years of government inertia but that is certainly not the case today.
This paralysis of leadership comes at a time when the overwhelming majority of politicians, economists, trade union leaders and even voters agree that Germany urgently needs to reshape its post-war industrial and social model to cope with the new challenges of globalisation.
"Leaving things the way they are is just not an option," according to Patrick Adenauer, head of the Association for Independent Enterprises, which represents the nation's small and medium-sized businesses.
"Germany must change or it will decline very quickly. The main thing we need is a clear direction from government and a sense of confidence that the government is bringing down welfare and labour costs and doing something to simplify the tax system," he told Inquirer.
Germany is hardly an economic basket case. It is the biggest exporter in the world, with its 82million people selling more goods abroad than the 296million Americans or 127million people of Japan. Corporate profits, wages and average living standards are still high. The problem is that its highly regulated labour market and high-cost model of generous welfare and social services that are largely paid for directly by employers have proven unable to reduce a jobless rate of more than 11 per cent. Unemployment in western Germany is about 7 per cent but 15 years of enormous investment in the formerly communist east of the country has not been able to get the jobless rate there below 20 per cent.
In the past two years of his seven years in power, Schroeder had begun to trim welfare, health and labour costs but even his tentative proposals had run into resistance within his own party and from the conservatives who control the nation's upper house of parliament. Most analysts agree that the best hope of further liberalising the economy was a Merkel-led government, with the second-best option being a clear Schroeder victory that would at least allow him to continue his more modest reform proposals.
The worst possible election outcome, according to Adenauer and other business leaders, would be a grand coalition between the CDU and the Social Democrats. That is the likeliest outcome of the coalition talks in Berlin. With Schroeder and Merkel each insisting on being chancellor under such a coalition, one possibility is that both would have to step down to allow a new leader to take over.
Another idea being floated in Berlin is that they would both be chancellor. Schroeder would hold the job for an agreed period and then hand over to Merkel, but she could hardly be confident that such a coalition would last long enough for her to have her turn in office.
When Merkel was leading the opinion polls by up to 20 percentage points there was widespread hope that her election could trigger reform well beyond Germany's borders. Blair, whose Government holds the EU presidency for the second half of this year, and Jose Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese-born head of the EU's bureaucracy, the European Commission, were both privately hoping for a Merkel victory and then the replacement of French President Jacques Chirac in 2007 by a more reformist conservative, Nicolas Sarkozy.
"Merkel and Chirac would not have worked particularly well together," says Julie Smith, deputy director of the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge University. But she says with Merkel and Sarkozy in power there might have been a clear new agenda that was more in line with the liberalising aspirations of Blair and other leaders from northern and eastern Europe.
"From Chirac and Schroeder we have seen a rhetorical commitment for France and Germany to co-operate but when they have combined it has been to block reforms. They have not produced an actual agenda for advancing the union, unlike the days of Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterand, when France and Germany really were driving Europe," Smith says.
Blair and Barroso are desperate for European leaders to spend less energy on institution-building projects such as a new EU constitution and instead to focus on real industrial and economic reforms, such as a stalled directive to liberalise the services sector, which accounts for 70 per cent of the EU economy. Blair had been banking so heavily on a Merkel victory that his six-month presidency of the EU is
only just approaching the halfway mark but is already being derided by some critics as a do-nothing tenure. Merkel would have been a crucial ally for Blair on the EU's next seven-year budget, for instance. The budget has been deadlocked because of Chirac and Schroeder's opposition to significant spending cuts, and Blair was waiting anxiously for the arrival of chancellor Merkel.
"If Germany's politicians are concentrating on trying to build coalitions, and then on trying to keep those coalitions together, the broader cause of economic reform within the EU will not exactly be at the top of their agenda," says Smith.
And to have a real impact any coalition government in Germany would need to be cohesive enough to withstand the short-term pain and electoral discomfort likely to be generated by reforms. Something as simple as introducing sensible school hours, for instance, would cause some angst. Most German schools now begin classes early in the morning and finish their day at lunch-time, forcing a parent to be at home in the afternoon. The result is that millions of highly educated women can work only part-time or not at all. Aligning the school day more closely with normal working hours would make it easier for them to take on full-time work but that would hardly lead to an immediate drop in unemployment. Coalition talks can often throw up surprises but only two types of coalition seem to have any real chance of emerging from the next few weeks of party negotiations, and both would probably be too weak to drive through awkward reforms.
One option is a grand coalition of the CDU and Social Democrats, which would struggle to find common ground on taxes, labour issues, health, pensions and EU issues. It would enjoy a majority in both houses of parliament but between them the two biggest parties cover a dangerously broad political spectrum.
The other possible option is a minority government headed by Schroeder and backed informally by the Left Party and perhaps even some conservatives who might abandon Merkel in a secret ballot. Its reforms would be resisted by the conservatives in the upper house, and Schroeder could be undone at any stage by his fierce rivals in the Left Party.
If no coalition can be agreed then the alternative is to go back to the voters. A rerun election would preoccupy Berlin for perhaps six months and the mainstream parties are so evenly tied and so far away from having a parliamentary majority that a second election might leave the picture just as uncertain.
Unless the main parties take the drastic step of joining forces to change the voting system, the best hope for a clear result in a rerun would be a collapse of the Left Party vote below the 5 per cent threshold.
That would strip the Left of its party status and 50-odd seats, making it easier for one of the main parties to stitch together a majority. The problem for Merkel and Schroeder is that now that Germany's proportional representation system has given the Left Party a disproportionate share of power, the former communists are just as likely to retain their share of the vote in a second election.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...E28737,00.html
And you think the U.S. election system and voters are messed up?
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