Is the German President elected by the people?

Answer 1

Germany has a system where each voter has two votes.

The first vote is to a particular person to represent the district. It works just like in elections in the US House of Representatives or the UK House of Commons- you directly vote for your district's representative. The person who gets the most votes, wins the district and is guaranteed a seat. Half (299) of the 598 representatives in the Bundestag (Parliament) are elected in this manner.

The second vote is where things get complicated, so I will speak in generalities here and not get too deep into the gritty details.

With your second vote, you vote for a "list", which basically means you are voting for a certain political party. All of the list votes are then tallied up. Because Germany has many political parties, there is a threshold- to be counted, a party must receive at least 5% of the total second votes or at least 3 constituencies in the first vote; any party that does not meet this threshold gets nothing. This keeps tiny extremist parties from abusing the system and gaining too much clout, and helps prevent a return of the gridlock Germany experienced during the 1920s (when there were too many parties and they refused to work together).

The parties that do meet the threshold split up the remaining half of the seats in the Bundestag. There is a complicated system involving an equally complicated mathematical formula for how to divide up the seats based on the proportion of the second votes the party received. Additionally, winners of the first vote count towards the seats awarded by the second vote.

So, as an example, a party wins 20 seats in the first vote, and after the formula is worked out, the party wins 50 seats via the second vote. The party gets 30 seats in addition to the 20 they won directly by the first vote, for the total of 50. What makes this complicated is when a party wins more first votes than second votes- as an example, a party wins 20 seats in the first vote but only earns 15 by the second vote. Because the winners of first votes are guaranteed a seat, the excess 5 seats become extra "overhang seats" that do not count against the 598. This is why there are, as of August 2015, 631 members of the Bundestag.

Answer 2

The German political system is very simple but for an expansive answer, the link below explains it the best.

Answer 3

The Germans have a democtatic government so the people elect the government.

Answer 4

The President of the Bundestag is elected by the members of the Bundestag, who in turn are elected by the people of Germany.