Why the electoral System of Germany is fairer and more democratic than the Indian

You probably know already that we recently had elections in India. India is the country with the second biggest population of the world and the biggest democracy on this earth. This is how it took five weeks to complete the voting process throughout the country. I am not going to discuss the results here, as I don’t want to make my blog political in any way. I don’t want to write about the different parties and although I may someday write about decisions of the government, I won’t write further about the result. I would like to write about the system instead!

In India, the party that has received 31% of the votes of the Indian people now rules with a majority of seats in parliament. This means, 69% of people have refused this party. This happens because in India, we vote for the local candidate. Whoever gets the higher number of votes locally goes to parliament – and the remaining votes get lost. He can win by one vote or very high, his party will have another seat in parliament. In this way, 69% of voters don’t want this party to rule but due to our system, this party got a majority which makes it easy for them to rule – it just doesn’t seem like a real democracy.

India’s population	1 270 000 000 (2014)
Total voters	815 000 000(2014)
Party	Votes	Seats
BJP	17,16,57,549	282
Congress	10,69,38,242	44
BSP	2,29,46,182	0
TMC	2,12,59,681	34
SP	1,86,72,916	5
AIADMK	1,81,15,825	37
CPM	1,79,86,773	9
TDP	1,40,94,545	16
AAP	1,13,25,635	4

When I told this to my German friends, they told me that this could never happen in the German election system. I asked how and Iris took the time to explain it to me. She told that it may be complicated but that it is much fairer, actually one of the fairest in the world – and I have to agree!

While we in India only make one cross on our ballot paper, Germans make two. They first can simply vote for one of the many participating parties, choosing one of which they like the basic program. After that, they make another cross for one particular candidate of their area. This candidate will, if he wins, enter parliament. In this way they would choose a person from their area, even if that person is not from the party for which they voted with their first vote.

When the votes are counted, the first vote will tell how many percent of the nearly 600 seats in the German parliament go to which party.

At the same time, every candidate that wins in his area will go to parliament. This is what happens with the second vote.

So if a party got 30% of the votes, they will have 30% of the seats in parliament. These seats will be filled with the candidates that won in their local area. If they have not won in so many local areas, they will fill up the seats with other party members according to a sequence which was announced before and which is calculated in a way that there are a fair number of candidates of each German state in the German parliament.

Now the big question: what happens if a party has more candidates that won locally than they have seats in the parliament according to the first vote of all voters? Then there are the ‘Überhangmandate’, the excess mandates or overhand seats. These candidates will go to parliament but due to them going, the other parties also get extra seats, so that the percentage of the parties is still the same as it was elected. In this way, the parliament can grow – but the percentage will stay the same.

The local winners will all be in the parliament. Every vote is counted and the percentage of seats that each party has in the government is guaranteed nevertheless.

I believe it is fair. I believe it is fairer than the Indian system. More democratic, more what the people really want.