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In my haste to put out the previous post, I missed a salient point regarding the issue of Germany’s ability to stand for something and provide for its inhabitants. That is one of democratic legitimacy. Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, is regarded as one of the largest democratically elected legislatures in the world — currently with 735 seats. That figure has changed, upwards, with each election due to the country’s complicated two-vote system, which awards seats both to party lists and individual candidates. Because bigger parties can field more candidates, they enjoy a disproportional advantage in getting seats. To counteract that advantage, seats have to be added and reshuffled. (It’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea.)
Bigger is not necessarily better, and even the “XXL” size still does not represent all the people it is mandated to. That’s because of how many people can’t vote.
When I travel around Germany, including to smaller cities and more out-of-the-way areas, I am struck by how diverse the social landscape is. I am speaking anecdotally and unscientifically, of course (and maybe tripping over a low bar?), but day-to-day Germany is a far more colorful patchwork of people than macro Germany gets credit for. And macro Germany doesn’t deserve credit, because the institutional level hardly reflects the population it is supposed to represent and serve.
It’s an oft said stat that 20% of Berlin’s population doesn’t have a German passport. That means nearly 775,000 people don’t have a say in how the German capital gets run. Some of that is by choice — EU citizens who don’t see the need for another EU passport, for example, or the legions of digital-nomad transients that parts of the city are mired in — but for many others it’s more the consequence of long-term exclusionary policy choices and over-engineered bureaucratic hurdles.
There is a shameful irony here that the leaders who laud Berlin’s “diversity” and “Weltoffenheit” aren’t getting into power because of that. If they did, well, they might not be in power.
Beyond Berlin, where the immigrant story is less tech bro and more Deutschland Tail, the democratic doubts are about as stark. For obvious reasons, German Officialdom prefers to focus on its Willkommenskultur. It was very proud of saying that, in the 2021 general election, every third person with a “migration background” was eligible to vote. That at least sounds commendable, until you realize that “migration background” is a flimsy concept, which includes people born and raised in Germany — they just have the bad luck of having at least one parent who wasn’t. Sorry, but those folks have to go in another category even though they are, legally speaking, exactly the same as everyone else.
So it’s a largely meaningless statistic drummed up to give German Officialdom the illusion of progress and inclusion without really having to progress and include. The less discussed flip side is this: Germany is home to around 70 million voting-age people, but ten million of them cannot vote. For all intents and purposes, these people do not matter. Politically speaking, 14% of Germany’s adult population does not exist.
Imagine if they did. It would be a fun experiment to just let everyone vote and see what happens. Of course, first you’d have to let everyone stand for election, otherwise you wouldn’t get an accurate understanding of whom people want legislating for them. When contemplating why Germany’s representatives don’t appear particularly representative, it’s helpful to state the obvious that if you can’t vote, you can’t run.
With so few outside groups allowed in, the pool of new political blood is pretty thin. This begins to address the discrepancy above, seeing lots of human difference all around Germany except in the place it matters most: the halls of German democratic power.
(NB: Due to how the Bundestag website filters its photo search, most but not everyone pictured above is an MP.)
To throw in another data point for good measure, the equivalent figure in the United States is about 19 million — or roughly 7.5% of the voting-age population. So Germany, with a quarter of the U.S. adult population, has twice the number of people relative to population without a say in who runs things and how. That is a lot of foreign folk, especially for a country that still struggles to see itself as a one of immigration, no matter how much it tells itself that it is.
Presuming at least some of them strive to obtain German citizenship, the backlog is so immense it means German bureaucracy is, in effect even if unintentionally, disenfranchising would-be compatriots. Dual citizenship, newly allowed, should make it easier for many people to access the ballot box, but the reform also presents a paradox. With the added incentive to get naturalized, the stack of applications grows, making it take even longer for an already overburdened bureaucracy to process them.
So we may be a long way off until we see any meaningful change in Germany’s real voting population — that is, full-fledged members of dem Volke, as is the pledge written plainly on the Reichstag facade. Meanwhile, the positions and decisions of elected officials are probably best viewed as having an accuracy of no more than 86% of what actual people actually living in Germany actually think.
NB: In light of time and other considerations, a deeper dive into how Germany compares to similar European countries on this issue is not currently possible, but certainly would be interesting to do.