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Capitol Building in Washington DC
Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP
At the end of this grueling week, in which Joe Biden won the US presidency after days of uncertainty, counting and attacks from Donald Trump, one thing is clear: America’s democracy has a structural problem.
And more.
The first problem is that a minority of votes can be enough to become president - because of the electoral system.
This was what happened in the 2016 Trump election. And this year, too, Joe Biden had been clearly ahead in the
popular vote
for days
, reaching as many votes as no candidate before him in US history - but until the end he had to think about it - Head race with Trump fears for individual key states.
A minority of votes can also be enough to control the Senate because sparsely populated states are disproportionately represented.
The second problem is that a man like Donald Trump, who routinely lies and openly questions democracy, could not only become a candidate for an important party, but could force that party entirely on its course.
As unanimously as these problems are usually described in the German public, German politicians are reluctant to draw conclusions from them.
The horror at the deficits of the political system in the USA does not lead to the fact that people in this country are distancing themselves.
On the contrary: some of what has brought US democracy to the brink of collapse is even being adopted in Germany or at least discussed with benevolent interest.
On the one hand it is about the type of right to vote, on the other hand it is about the parties, more precisely: about their guardianship.
The right to vote: not every vote counts equally
There was little question ahead of this presidential election that Joe Biden would end up with more votes than Donald Trump.
The only question was: is that enough?
Trump could have become president a second time without winning a majority of the nationwide votes.
Because in the US, as in any majority electoral system, not every vote counts equally.
A majority of the votes does not necessarily translate into a majority in the decisive
Electoral College
, the electoral body that formally elects the president in the end.
For a long time this was not a big problem, but now it is becoming more and more obvious - because the distortion of the majority has long been the rule and systematic.
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Michigan Ballot: Not Every Vote Counts Equally
Photo: Jim West / dpa
Because of the geographical distribution of their voters and the layout of the electoral district, the Democrats always need a clear victory in order to have a chance at the White House.
When it comes to the Senate, things look even worse.
This reverses the property of majority electoral systems that is often referred to as an advantage: that they at least create clear relationships and a clear power alternative.
But the circumstances are not clear and the power alternative disappears if a party does not come to power even with a much better result.
This weakness is only now becoming extremely visible, but it is fundamentally based on majority voting.
The German electoral system provides for a personalized proportional representation that emphasizes the equality of all votes.
In the discussion about a reform of the electoral law, which should prevent the Bundestag from getting bigger and bigger, other electoral procedures have recently been discussed.
For example, members of the Bundestag for the CDU called for a so-called trench suffrage, a system in which half of the votes are given according to proportional representation, the other half according to the majority principle: the winner gets everything.
With such a right to vote, the Union would have won an absolute majority three times in a row - and could have governed alone.
The other parties reject this.
Again and again I heard from the Union that one would like to see such a ditch suffrage.
Or a pure majority vote.
Or just, as parliamentary group legal counsel Ansgar Heveling now writes on request, a "real two-vote right to vote", which however does not have to be split in half.
Union parliamentary group leader Ralph Brinkhaus told SPIEGEL in April: "Unfortunately, you will not get a majority vote or voting rights."
Since that did not work, the Union did not want to compensate for at least 15 overhang mandates.
Here, too, there was resistance, now there will be a maximum of three, but this still follows US logic: These three mandates distort the distribution of seats, and even if it is unlikely, they could theoretically help a coalition with a minority of votes to achieve a parliamentary majority.
Either way: The most important German party would like a little more USA in the electoral system.
Leadership selection in parties: away from representation
It would have been difficult for someone like Donald Trump to come to power earlier.
His own party would probably have stopped him, it would have prevented a destructive outsider like him from running.
But parties have lost their function as controllers of themselves since they introduced pre-election processes in which people vote openly who should stand for them.
This is how the American political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue in their book “How Democracies Die”, which has also been widely discussed in Germany.
The masses should decide, not the party leaders.
That is the idea of increased grassroots participation, and it is mostly based on the desire to dare to be more democratic.
But it inevitably assumes a mistrust of representation, although representation in a mass society may be inevitable, but it is definitely inherent in democracies.
The majority principle is more trusted than the decision made by representatives who have to give account - even if that is the principle of parliamentarism.
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Friedrich Merz
Photo: Adam Berry / Getty Images
There are good arguments in favor of this direct access to power.
It creates space for politicians who bring unorthodox ideas to the party that can break dogmas.
But it also creates space for politicians who act against the party they stand for.
He's tearing down firewalls.
Trump was able to run against the so-called Republican establishment and then, once in power, met little resistance in the party.
Today, according to political science surveys, it is much more radical than ordinary conservative parties - more AfD than CDU.
The model of a democracy in parties that is as direct as possible has nonetheless also become more popular in Germany.
Firstly in the form of the listening policy, which relies on discussions with the grassroots as directly as possible, instead of relying on the formation of wills about the party structures from local to federal associations.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer went on a listening tour through the party, Michael Kretschmer (CDU) and Martin Dulig (SPD) trolled through Saxony, the CSU politician Manfred Weber as a candidate for the EU commissioner or French President Emmanuel Macron sought direct contact.
Town hall meetings
and regional
conferences
are nowadays good form in almost all parties.
Second, in the form of primary elections: The SPD had its chairmen elected from the grassroots, in the hope of breathing life into the party again.
She also had a vote on participation in the coalition in the federal government.
Such demands are even being made in the Union, most recently by the Junge Union and the CDU in Saxony-Anhalt, which hopes to make Friedrich Merz the party leader of a party that he himself says many decision-makers did not want him.
And who knits an anti-establishment narrative out of it.
What the great danger of this approach is named.
It grows out of skepticism about representation - and it can turn into populist we-down-there-against-the-corrupt-up-there criticism.
This danger can be exacerbated if attempts at popularization are hardly accepted.
Almost half of the members did not vote in a directional decision about the party leadership of the SPD.
Recently, in a non-binding mood test, only one in five members of the Junge Union voted for a candidate for party leadership.
A decision-making process that relies on the legitimacy of the majority instead of representation by an authorized minority, even more so produces a decision by an unauthorized minority that does not have to account to anyone.
That doesn't help legitimacy, it actually harms it.
Representation always had a bad repute: The deal in the back room is not a new picture.
What is new is that the parties, who are representative by their nature, make this accusation their own.
In the USA, but increasingly also in Germany.
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