GERMAN ELECTIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 264, 7 November 1932, Page 6

GERMAN ELECTIONS.

PARTIES NOT PERSONS. (By W. R. KINGSTON.) Parliamentary elections in Germany are conducted on lines totally different from what we know in New Zealand. No candidates are announced before the elections, but only twenty or thirty parties, and there are no fixed arrangements of seats and electorates.

Although this method may seem strange to us, it has been designed to ensure that every one of the diverse and conflicting elements which make up Germany is represented in the Federal Parliament, the Reichstag. Few nations have had such a checkered career as tlio territory which we now call Germany, and the influences of the past have left their marks in the politics of to-day. The Reformation was fought out on German soil and there is still to-day a strong Catholic party, called the Centre. The working classes of industrial Germany have drunk deep of the philosophy of Karl Harx, hence the powerful Social Democrat party. Proximity to Russia and the horrors of the post-war revolution and the- currency inflation explain the size of the Communist party. Then there are the separatist movements representing the different historical backgrounds o£ the territories and States which were welded by Bismarck last century into a single Empire, eucb. as the Hanover party and the Bavarian People's party. Finally there is the intense pride of nationalism, of faith in the greatness of their country, in some cases tinged with monarchisni and the love of display, which gives rise to the Nationalist, or Conservative, parties, culminating in the ultra-Nationalists, the Xazis, under the brilliant showmanship and organisation of Herr Hitler.

The peculiar electoral system gives representation to all these conflicting interests. Each party is entitled to one representative in the Reichstag for every 60.000 votes cast for that party in the country. Thus a movement which securest 600,000 votes in all, but widely scattered in the small villages throughout the whole countrveide, would be entitled to ten representatives nevertheless. The only proviso, which is designed to prevent a multitude of miniature parties, is that each party must have one block of 60,000 votes in' any one of thirty-five electoral districts.

Assured of the first 60,000 somewhere, all the votes cast for that party in all the districts are metaphorically thrown into one common pot, and it receives.one seat for every 60,000 cast in its favour. All the votes left over beyond these multiples of 60,000 are wasted. The deputies who are to fill the party seats are chosen after the election by the committee, of the party from among its candidates. To ensure having enough to choose from," the party nominates a list ia excess of the number of seats it hopes to win. Thus in the Reichstag there is no member representing Munich or Hamburg or Berlin West; there are only members of party, and they represent principles rather than places. One effect of this system is that all the leaders and most notable characters in the .parties remain from year to year and are not liable to be lost by the vagaries of a particular electorate. Another effect of this system is that the heavier the poll the greater the number of deputies elected. The 1930 elections aroused such interest that 81 per cent of the voters went to the polls, and 577 deputies were elected. At the elections in July last 84 per cent of the electorate recorded their votes and thus produced a House of 607. But at the same time the system had the effect of extinguishing at least half a dozen small parties that between them had had 50 seats in the Reichstag from September, 1930, to July. 1932, indicating that they had polled at least 3,000,000 votes in 1930. They disappeared, not because they failed to individually poll a considerable vote, but because they did not succeed in assembling a total of 60,000 in some one single electoral, district. _ -.-...