> the relative majority with fptp is always with the CSU.
I feel like this is part of the reason. CDU/CSU currently seem to profit most from this system and they have been governing for 16 years. Before that, SPD got the most direct mandates and was governing.
Even if the governing parties wanted a change, it would probably be hard to convince their MPs to vote for a law that would endanger their own re-election.
They were defined by law. They are supposed to have roughly equal populations and must be re-assigned if the difference in population exceeds 25% (I don't know what that means in practice, e.g., what the reference is.)
Tangential point but Germany's parliament has a 5% public vote threshold for parties to enter parliament (some exceptions apply).
According to current polls, that means between of 6%-9% of votes (for minor parties) will end up without parliamentary representation (5% at the last federal election).
NB: The number of not represented people is of course much higher, even discounting non-voters and underage citizens, since most(all?) foreign residents don't have the right to vote in federal elections.
I don't know either, therefore I considered it a pretty tangential point. It feels like the choice is a bit more diverse here because there are six(+1*) parties all but guaranteed to enter parliament, so you wouldn't waste a vote if you voted for any of them.
*) seven actually, one party (CSU) only standing in Bavaria instead of the conservative party CDU.
Hm, as I understand it, if one party won all 299 direct mandates at 0% 2nd vote share, the other parties' seats would have to be increased until 299 == 0%. Depending on how you round, that would be at least 30,000 seats (there's some tolerance allowed that I did not consider here but that's the ballpark for that unlikely scenario).
The linked site lists a (more realistic) scenario already, where the number of seats comes out to more than 900. How did you end up at your 897 seat upper bound?
Actually, I should add that even in the unlikely extreme scenario, the upper bound would be the number of candidates on the parties' lists (Landeslisten). Even if a party would have a right to more seats, they cannot fill more than they have approved candidates on their lists. One could determine this actual upper bound by looking at each state's lists, which are public of course, but I haven't quickly found them compiled in one place, so I won't bother.
(Berlin's pirate party once won a surprisingly high share in the state parliament but wasn't able to fill all seats, because they were polling way lower when compiling their list.)
> (Berlin's pirate party once won a surprisingly high share in the state parliament but wasn't able to fill all seats, because they were polling way lower when compiling their list.)
That's not correct. They had 15 candidates and won 15 seats.
For all the nitty-gritty details check paragraph 4.5 on page 67 of the official election results [1].
GPL by some quite popular interpretations of what derivate work means. I do not personally agree but those interpretations are common enough to be a real concern and I do not think it has been tested in court yet (GPL has been tested in court but I do not think this particular aspect has).
Is that so? I thought, if one violates the TOS, the other side may terminate the service. I did not know they then had the automatic right to then log data suitable for tracking and identification.
> Because nearly everyone in Germany is in some sort of union.
This is not true. DGB (comprising most unions and all major ones) reported less than 6M members last year [1] out of ~45M working population total or ~34M of dependently employed people [2].
A lot of people might end up benefiting from a union due to them often negotiating contracts for whole occupational groups, but they are not members.
