Re:Birdwatch, Twitter's new collaborative fact checking system
by somenameforme on Saturday November 05, 2022 @02:12PM
(#33484048)
If they formed a normal coalition government, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But they did not, and could not. They couldn't get 13% of the other 63% of people to side with them, even in exchange for shared political control!
And that 37% was brief and their biggest moment in light of absolute civil chaos including things like a 30% unemployment rate. 4 months later, elections were held again - elections that the Nazis were exceptionally optimistic about. They ended up going down to 33%. Then shenanigans started. There would be no more fair elections in Germany for nearly 2 decades.
This seems misleading. The governmental system at the time was a parliamentary system, not a first-past-the-post like most American elections. In a parliamentary system, there are ~dozens of parties and it's vanishingly rare for any party to ever get a simple majority. Your own link lists 16 parties who had enough votes to get at least one seat in the Reichstag. Selecting the leaders to form an overall government normally involves political maneuvering to bring multiple smaller parties into an alliance to form an actual voting majority. Naturally if there's so much division that it's impossible to form a majority in favor of any particular government, weird stuff is gonna go down.