Elections dominate American public life at this moment. The German election season has just ended. It is worth considering how differently these two democratic nations elect their governments.

The American system, as we all learned in school, is based on a balance of powers among legislative, executive and judicial branches. Legislators represent a geographical district, in which there is only one winner. We elect the leader of the executive branch, the president, separately from our legislative representatives. The president’s party might not control a majority in Congress, as was the case with Bill Clinton. We might even elect a president who has no fellow party-members in Congress, which would have happened if Ross Perot or Ralph Nader had won. The president’s ability to oppose a congressional majority, even of his own party, is enshrined in the veto power.

This all may seem obvious to Sun Journal readers, until one considers how different European democracies are from this structure. In Germany, as in England, Italy, Holland, Sweden and nearly all European states, the executive leader is elected by the legislature, and thus represents a parliamentary majority. This majority and the executive branch work together to decide upon and implement policy. The attempt by the Republican Congress to shut down the government in 1995 while Clinton was president is unthinkable here.

The German legislature (Bundestag) is not just composed of the winners of legislative races. Half of the seats in the Bundestag are apportioned among the political parties according to the percentage of the votes they won. The composition of the legislature closely reflects the actual voting patterns of the population.

This system places more weight on parties and their platforms than on personal characteristics of candidates. There is more room in Germany, and in other European parliamentary democracies, for multiple parties. In the United States, the congressional candidate who can win election outside of the two major parties is extremely rare. Bernie Sanders from Vermont is currently the only independent member in the House of Representatives. At the national level no significant third party has existed in the U.S. since World War II.

Many Germans believed that the proliferation of tiny parties wrecked their first democratic republic after World War I and led to the rise of the Nazis. The makers of the West German constitution, therefore, determined that a party has to win 5 percent of the national vote to be represented in the Bundestag. This 5 percent hurdle, which now applies to united Germany, tends to push voters toward more successful parties. That hurdle is still low enough that small parties can challenge the dominance of the two major parties, the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD) and the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU).

Only once since the end of World War II has one of these parties won more than 50 percent of the vote, so parliamentary majorities must be based on a coalition of a major party with a smaller party.

Nearly 60 years after the end of the Nazi regime, fears of fascism still resonate in public life here. Since the provincial elections in September, much attention has been focused on the success of extreme right-wing parties in getting more than 5 percent of the votes, thus gaining seats in provincial legislatures. Although these parties blame immigrants for every problem and toy with neo-Nazi slogans, they represent mainly a diffuse protest in times of economic distress, rather than a threat to democracy. Throughout the history of West Germany and since 1991, united Germany, extreme right-wing parties have often been able to win 5 percent to 10 percent of the vote without any noticeable effect on national or provincial politics.

The more significant result of this openness to smaller parties has been the gradual rise of the Green Party. Beginning in the 1960s as an environmental protest movement, the Greens transformed themselves into an organized political party in the late 1970s. They surpassed 5 percent at the national level in 1983, and now poll about 10 percent of German voters. Since 1998, Germany has been governed by an SPD-Green coalition.

In a later article, I will discuss the high level of environmental consciousness which pervades daily life here, connected to the political success of the Greens.

For now, it is worth noting that the possibility of voting for smaller parties forces the larger parties to moderate their positions, preventing the stubborn lack of compromise and exaggerated personal nastiness that characterizes our presidential campaign.

From afar, the enormous waste of resources directed toward demonizing our most important political figures seems to have little to do with democracy. It was not, in fact, the presence of small parties, but rather the widespread sense that the whole political system was fraudulent, which prepared the way for Hitler.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at shochsta@bates.edu.

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