Will German neo-Nazis give the Ukraine to Putin?

Or, How Germany taught me to love the electoral college

Last night, the German government broke up.

Probably, there will be re-elections soon.

Because Germany is the Ukraine’s biggest supporter next to America, it raises the question whether a new government will still support the Ukraine like the current one does.

Though it’s unlikely, it’s at least theoretically possible that a new government could include pro-Putin elements who would hand over the Ukraine to Putin like a big juicy steak.

But first, let me tell you about my woman crying in the kitchen.

Women crying in kitchens

The morning I woke up and Trump had won, I found Astrid weeping at the kitchen table.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little – but she was close to tears.

I assumed she was worried about Trump and his evil plan to operate the uteruses out of all women and keep them in his personal safe, but I was surprised to learn that wasn't the problem at all.

The problem was Putin.

She was worried about what will happen if America, under Trump, drops support of the Ukraine and maybe even leaves NATO.

That is a real possibility, and if it happens, Putin will be able to take part or all of the Ukraine, potentially placing Russian troops and atomic weapons on the Polish border.

From there, would he march into the European Union?

That’s the worry the German and everyone else have.

First, here’s governments break up in Germany:

The current German government is an unnatural coalition of three parties that don't have much in common.

Coalitions are always volatile, because the parties have different ideas of what they should be doing, especially in a crisis, and three-way coalitions are more volatile than most.

In this case, one of the three parties, the conservative FDP, wants to save Germany's stagnating economy by going in a more conservative direction, and wrote it down in a long, well thought-out proposal.

But senior partner, the center-left SPD, doesn’t like conservative economic ideas, so chancellor Olaf Scholz “fired” the FDP guy (that’s really the word they used), breaking up the coalition.

Now, Scholz either has to find a new coalition partner or call for re-elections.

Re-elections are the more probable option, and the candidates will include pro-Putin parties.

But before I get to that, let me explain how the coalition system works, in case you’re fuzzy on it.

The coalition system vs. the electoral college

In Germany, as in America, the constitution requires that a government have the simple majority of the vote in any election, or more than 50%.

But it is rare for one party to get 50%. There are too many parties competing, so the others get spread out. Even when Hillary Clinton famously won the popular vote over Trump, she had under 50%.

In America, we solve that problem with the electoral college.

Instead of counting the popular vote, we vote by state, and allow the states to bundle their electoral votes if they choose. By bundling the votes, the small parties are left behind and it is possible for one candidate to gets 50%.

Germany does not have an electoral college, so they only way for them to get 50% is by two or more parties pooling their votes in a coalition.

But with half a dozen parties competing for votes, the most any party can hope for is around 30% of the vote. That means the ”winner” may need more than two partners to get 50%.

For example, the two biggest parties in polls currently are the conservative CDU with about 30% (think Germany’s Republicans) and the center-left SPD with about 15% (Germany’s Democrats. Even if they formed a coalition, they would need a third partner.

(And it is likely that they try to form a coalition together – imagine the Democrats and the Republicans in the same coalition in the White House, and you get what Germans call the “Grand Coalition”. To us, that’s an impossible scenario, but it happens quite often in Germany.)

If new elections take place, it now looks like the conservative CDU would win, but would have trouble finding enough coalition partners.

Which brings us to the fringe parties

Like in America, concerns about immigration and other issues have driven many voters to support radical fringe parties.

Currently, the most popular fringe party is the AfD, which is sometimes considered a neo-Nazi party and commands almost 20% of the vote. Next comes the extreme leftist party Die Linke (“The Left”), which is the current incarnation of the former state party of Communist East Germany. Then there is BSW, a new party that is both far-left and far-right at the same time, combining elements of nationalism and socialism.

Wait, did you just say nationalist and socialist in the same sentence about a German political party?

Yes I did.

If you think the right-wing trend in America is bad, think about that sentence for a moment.

The major parties are all unified in their support of the Ukraine, but the fringe parties are all pro-Putin. So the question is whether a fringe party could get into power.

Wait, neo-Nazis could take power in Germany?

Technically yes, but it is unlikely.

According to current polling, all three fringe parties combined have under 25% of the vote. So they can’t take power alone.

But there is a small posibility one of them could join a coalition as junior partner.

After all, passions are running high and no one knows how crazy voters might get – if the fringe parties win big enough, it might be difficult to form a coalition without them, especially the AfD.

Wait, are you saying re-elections could let neo-Nazis into power in Germany?

Technically, yes – but realistically: No.

It’s hard to imagine even the conservative CDU joining the AfD in a coalition.

So it remains very unlikely that Germany will drop the Ukraine anytime soon.

Isn’t it stupid to call for re-elections at a time like this anyway?

Yes, it’s entirely stupid, and for Olaf Scholz probably political suicide, as he has little chance of being re-elected.

Surprisingly, that kind of thing is not uncommon in Germany. In fact, that kind of thing is common in any coalition-style system. It is what makes coalition-style systems so unstable.

How Germany taught me to love the electoral college

Americans love to complain about their oddball electoral system, sometimes even naively claiming that a coalition system would be more “democratic” because it allows for a higher variety of parties representing more facets of the population.

No one talks about the downside of coalitions, namely, that they tend to break up.

The electoral college, with its winner-takes-all principle, is what makes America so stable: Since they started over 200 years ago, US presidential election have taken place every four years like clockwork. That is unheard-of in coalition-style democracies.