the german election system: a chance for pirates?

Or: why it does make sense to vote for the pirate party even if they don’t get 5%

This posting is mainly for people who …

• … want to know more about the German election system
• … find the pirate party interesting, but don’t think it’s very smart to vote for a party which most probably won’t make it into parliament

Two weeks ago I wrote that I find it highly unlikely that the pirate party will make it into the German parliament after the elections, as they will not be able to receive the 5% of the votes that are needed.

This is not entirely true, due to the fairly complicated election system is Germany.

I’ll try to shortly sum up the German election system, and then come to my conclusion – skip the introduction if you’re familiar with the system.

When we go voting on the 27th of September, we have a first vote and a second vote.
With the first vote, we vote for a politician in our region, with the second for a party.

First Vote:
Germany consists of 299 regions. The politican receiving the most votes in his or her region via first votes goes directly into parliament – the other candidates of the region in question don’t. The idea behind this is that every of the 299 German regions will be represented in parliament, which is a good thing.
Let us say that party B wins 50 of these regions, so they will sent 50 politicans to parliament, no matter how the results of the second votes are.

Second Vote:
If party A gets 40% of the second votes, and party B 10%, the number of candidates of party A in parliament will be at least 40%, of party B at least 10%.
If party B gets 10% of the second votes, they will receive 60 out of the 598 seats in the parliament. This 60 seats will first be filled with the candidates who won the 50 direct mandates via the first vote, then the missing ten candidates will be taken from a specific list the party B published before the election.
A party only gets into parliament when they receive at least 5% of the second votes. For example: party C gets 5% of the second votes – they will receive at least 30 seats. Party D only gets 4.9% of the second votes – they get zero seats.
Now comes some quite difficult mechanism: if party B should get 70 direct mandates with the first vote instead of the 50 we talked about before, but they only have 60 seats by the second votes, they still can get all 70 candidates into the parliament; the German constitutional court ruled this mechanism anticonstitutional a few months ago. Since the biggest party – CDU – gets most out of this exploit, and since the court declared that this has to be changed until 2011, the CDU blocked all tries to change the system before the election. That’s democray for you.

Now comes the interesting part:
If a party receives at least three direct mandates, the party in question can ignore the 5% rule. So perhaps it might have been a very reasonable strategy to focus on the three districts which had the highest amount of pirate-voters in the europe-election a few months ago, and try to win direct mandates there? If this worked, we would get the three pirates in question, plus around 5 – 15 pirates from the second votes into parliament.

In a box:
It is very reasonable to vote for your regional pirate politician if there is a small chance for him winning in your district.
Looking at the results of the Europe-election, I find it very likely that the pirates have a chance of winning three direct mandates. If this should be the case, using your second vote for the pirate party is an extremely sensible thing to do.

(If you happen to be German, the “Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung” released three short and very informative videos about the election system)

Edit: are direct mandates anticonstitutional or not?