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Peggy Nash interviews Nils Schmid about coalitions and proportional representation in Germany at Broadbent summit

Former NDP MP Peggy Nash interviews Nils Schmid, Foreign Policy Spokesperson for the Social Democratic Party, about how parties work cooperatively in Germany’s proportional representation system.

The excerpt below was taken from an interview by Peggy Nash for the Broadbent Institute. Watch the full interview with Nil Schmid on the Broadbent Institute’s youtube channel.

Nils Schmid: Usually proportional representation results in coalition governments. Normally you do not win an outright majority of seats in a proportional electoral system.

There have been some exceptions notably on the provincial level. But on the federal level, except for the beginning of the West German federal republic there have always been coalition governments, usually consisting of two parties.

Now for the first time we have a three party coalition on the federal level. 

German politics sort of got used to coalition politics.

Peggy Nash: Here coalition has been this dirty word that gets thrown out.

Nils Schmid: There’s nothing dirty about it. You just have to respect the will of the electorate.

But you also need to be ready for compromise. Usually you do not get 100% of your party platform in a coalition agreement.

Coalition agreement is very good because more and more coalition partners try to find guarantees for their political projects via the coalition agreements. Which leads to coalition agreements that encompass more than 150 pages. Relatively detailed information about the bills that are going to be prepared in specific policy fields.

I took part in the working group on foreign policy with my foreign policy colleagues from the Liberals and the Green Party in order to form this new government and we really worked through all fields of foreign policy: defense, human rights, humanitarian aid, development aid, the armed forces….very complex. It serves as a guideline for the legislative process in the four year term.

It also helps to build trust. When you sit together for six weeks and you negotiate certain topics you find some common human ground, a sense of community, shared values and you get to know each other. There’s a lot of confidence building going on in these negotiations.

German politics is not so adversarial. The major political forces know that if push comes to shove you need to accept a compromise and you need to build a coalition. 

Peggy Nash: So it reduces that polarization.

Nils Schmid: Yes.

It’s much easier to build a coalition in the same political camp. If progressive parties join forces it’s a much more positive note to the negotiation and the agreement.

But sometimes you have to form a coalition across the aisle, a coalition between Social Democrats and Conservatives. We had to do that for many years because we had a very diverse Parliament.

For many years we had just three or four parties represented in Parliament. All these four parties were used to getting along with one another. 

The formation of provincial coalition governments serve as a sort of laboratory for new political constellations. In the 60’s the Social Democrats for the first time formed a coalition government with the Liberal Party in one of the biggest provinces… Some years later they did the same on the federal level.

We had the same history with the Social Democratic – Green coalition. It started on the provincial level, in some provinces, then in 1998 the Red Green coalition was put together on the federal level.

The same is true for the current constellation, what we call the Traffic Light…you could also call it the Lithuanian coalition, because it’s the colour of the Lithuanian flag – red, green and yellow, Green party, Social Democratic Party, and the Liberal Party, they are the yellow ones. This coalition was for the first time put up as an experiment in one small province and it worked out well, then we were courageous enough to do it on the federal level.

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