Election day

Sunday was election day in the state of Niedersachsen, which gave me a reason to try and understand more about German politics.

Elections happen every four years, with the state elections in January, and the federal ones in September. Germany is a parlimentary democracy, which means that you vote for a party, not a person. The party then chooses its leader and that's who becomes governor, chancellor, etc. However, in the federal elections each voter also gets a second vote for representative, which they can use to vote directly for an individual candidate.

This system results in a lot of coalitions between two or more parties. This is confusing to me as an American... it seems like the German system has a bunch of parties, 5 or 6 at least, but when they start teaming up it's more like a 2 party system.

The CDU teams up with the FDP, and the SPD teams up with the Green party. There is also the Left party, the National Socialist party (That's right, the Nazis. They still exist, but get very few votes), and the Pirate party.

If I were a German citizen I would want to support the Pirate party just because they have the coolest name. Plus you could dress up with an eye patch and a parrot, and say "shiver me timbers," or however that translates into German. They actually have nothing to do with that kind of piracy. Their agenda mostly deals with the digital age, freedom of information, and e-governance. It would be cooler if they were building pirate ships.

So what about Niedersachsen? As far as I understand it, Niedersachsen is like the Ohio of Germany. Other than being kind of big, having a lot of farmland, and Hannover maybe being similar to Cleveland (we even have a team called the Indians), Niedersachsen's election this year is supposed to be a barometer for how things will go in the national elections. The moderately conservative CDU lost its majority to the moderately liberal SPD. It was a tight race and a big upset for the conservatives. If you want to read more, here's a short and pretty clear article about the election.

What does this all mean? It means the pendulum is swinging gently toward the left, and the CDU, Angela Merkel's party, might be in trouble come September.

If you read about David McAllister in my last post, you might be interested to know that he's not out escorting princesses tonight. He's probably moping around feeling like a loser. Of course he didn't lose, his party did. The new governor of Niedersachsen will be Stephan Weil, whose name lends itself to political advertisements because 'weil' means 'because' in German. Think of all the possible slogans he could have.

However, if he could appear on a poster with a peg leg, a big gold earring, and a bottle of rum I'd be more excited to vote for him. Maybe that's why Germany doesn't allow expats like me to be citizens.