- A numbers game - 27th February 2025
- NOT Wizzy! - 26th February 2025
- Fair cops?! - 25th February 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), reporting political stories, as well as the absurdly funny effects of the First Past The Post electoral system, has always played a major role for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, and now this is underlined by the incredible complexity of the coalition system in the German elections this week.
The numbers are mind-boggling.
Vast swathes of people vote in a UK General Election (GE), or the poll (at a different time) to elect Members of the Senedd in Wales.
For many, clarity prevails with the First Past The Post (FPTP) system (there is a measure of that in the elections to the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru [WP/SC] too), so people know what they have to do, and it contributes to the high turnout.
But FPTP does throw up ridiculous anomalies, so you have to ask yourself whether it is worth being simple to understand.
For example Margaret Thatcher was one of the most polarising (and successful) figures in British politics, winning three successive GEs.
But she won those because she piled up seats in the areas she knew the Tories would win anyway, yet never actually secured a majority of votes cast.
That, however, is also true of every single Prime Minister (PM) since Stanley Baldwin won 55 per cent of the popular vote at the 1931 GE.
This sounds (and is) an absurd situation, yet reforming it is a very difficult area, and a key problem is often put forward by MPs themselves.
But I have never been persuaded by this argument – that there is a strong link between the parliamentarian and the constituency he or she represents.
In my experience a lot of the voters don’t actually know who the person representing them IS!
I remember doing television vox pops for BBC Cymru Wales Today (WT) in a South Wales valleys town after the area’s MP said he was standing down, and naming him, but a lot of those I approached said: “Who’s he then?”.
There are, I think, higher obstacles.
Giving some form of Proportional Representation (PR) may, perhaps, be fairer (particularly to smaller parties), it might, though, turn off voters because it can be amazingly complicated, and we have just seen this in the German elections.
Coalition talks are underway now, and they could have been even more difficult because the Bundestag might have had anything between four and seven parties (taking the Conservative CDU and CSU as one bloc).
All the attention has been on the rise of the far right party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD).
Preliminary results of the official election count showed the CDU/CSU took the largest share of the vote with 28.5 per cent, while the AfD won a record 20.8 per cent – its best result in a federal election since its formation in 2013.
There has been little attention given, though, to the daunting task now facing Friedrich Merz as he tries to put together a government, and he has ruled out working with the AfD as it would breach the ‘firewall’.
Even building a coalition with the left-of-centre Social Democrats (SPD) alone will not be at all easy. After what by German standards was a rough campaign, many fear it will prove difficult to build the necessary trust and find the compromises German coalition deals require.
One SPD MP recently said the prospect of a grand coalition made her “feel like gagging”. Mr Merz did not help his case by spending election eve ranting at “green and left-wing idiots” who he suggested were not in possession of a full quotient of marbles.
A bigger challenge will be his willingness to compromise on his proposals to manage irregular immigration to Germany. Mr Merz has said his demands for permanent controls at Germany’s borders and the rejection of asylum-seekers are non-negotiable.
But both the SPD and Greens say they contravene domestic and European law.
The higher the number of votes for the smaller parties in the Bundestag, the fewer seats for the larger parties and the trickier the coalition options for the CDU/CSU.
If none of the smaller parties had gained enough votes to qualify for a seat (which was always unlikely), there would almost certainly have been a choice in coalition between the CDU/CSU, and the SPD, or the Greens although it is likely now to be with the SPD.
The situation is unbelievably intricate. Under Germany’s electoral rules, whether the main centre-left and centre-right parties would be able to form what used to be known as a ‘grand’ coalition depended entirely on whether the new ‘left-conservative’ Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) could reach the necessary five per cent threshold needed to gain parliamentary representation.
It fell agonisingly short-by three-one-hundredths of a percentage point-so this means the CDU/CSU and SPD will have a majority, albeit probably of just 13 seats, and will not need to team up with the Greens who will now enter the parliamentary opposition.
That ideologically messy three-party government is exactly what Mr Merz, who wants to act decisively to restore German voters’ faith in politics, wanted to avoid, and frankly, nobody really knows what’s going to happen over the next few weeks.
So complicated is the situation that tactical voting was probably used to boost the chances of a particular outcome, which is often favoured by more sophisticated voters, so it is like “playing 3D chess”, declares Frieder Schmid at YouGov.
Making any changes to the elector system we have, then, is fraught with difficulties, because I certainly don’t want to be “playing 3D chess”!
The memories of Phil’s, astonishing award-winning career in journalism (during which reporting political stories was often paramount) while he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
