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Politics in Germany


Politics in Germany

Germany is a federal republic, consisting of 16 states or federal-states ('Bundesländer'). The federal parliament ('Bundestag') is elected every four years in a fairly complicated system, involving both direct and proportional representation. A party will be represented in Parliament if it can gather at least 5% of all votes or at least 3 directly won seats. The parliament elects the Federal Chancellor ('Bundeskanzler', currently Angela Merkel) in its first session, who serves as the head of the government. There is no restriction regarding re-election. The 'Bundesländer' are represented at the federal level through the Federal Council ('Bundesrat'). Many federal laws have to be approved by the council. This can lead to situations where Council and Parliament are blocking each other if they are dominated by different parties. On the other hand, if both are dominated by the same party with strong party discipline (which usually is the case with CDU-CSU-FDP coalitions), its leader has the opportunity to rule rather heavy handedly, the only federal power being allowed to intervene being the Federal Constitutional Court ('Bundesverfassungsgericht'). The formal head of state is the President ('Bundespräsident'), who is not involved into day-to-day politics and has mainly ceremonial and representative duties. He can also suspend the parliament, but all executive power lies with the chancellor. The President of Germany is elected every 5 years by a specially convened national assembly, and is restricted to serving a maximum of two five year terms. The two largest parties are CDU ('Christlich Demokratische Union', Christian Democratic Party) and SPD ('Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands', Social Democratic Party). Due to the proportional voting system, smaller parties can also be represented in parliament. Medium-sized parties of relative importance are CSU ('Christlich Soziale Union', Christian Social Party, most important party within Bavaria, a kind of CDU subsidiary), FDP ('Freie Demokratische Partei', nominally Liberals, but merely comparable with Republicans' Tea Party faction), the Green party ('B�ndnis 90/Die Gr�nen'), since summer 2005, the new Left Party ('Die Linke', most important party in the East), the result of a merger between the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) (legal successor of GDR's state party, SED (Socialist Unity Party)) and the Alternative for Work and Social Justice (WASG) (founded by SPD's ex-leader, Oskar Lafontaine, to accommodate SPD's former left wing creating an alternative to Gerhard Schröder's "Agenda 2010" policy), and, since 2011, the Pirates' Party ('Piratenpartei', a civil rights and liberties movement). There have been some attempts by extreme right-wing parties (NPD - National Democratic Party / REP - Republicans) to get into parliament, but so far they have failed the 5% requirement (except in some State parliaments, currently Saxony and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania); extreme left-wing parties (MLPD - Marxist-Leninist Party / DKP - German Communist Party) virtually only have minimal influence on administrative levels below State parliaments.

The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Germany


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Germany Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.

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