Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Why has the Right-Wing AfD become so Popular in Germany?" video.

4:48 And this is why a proper proportional system that doesn't lock out smaller parties is better. Here in Norway we have 10 political parties represented in our 169 seat parliament representing our population of 5,4 million people. In other words, lots of alternatives to picking a party like AfD if they're not actually aligned with your values. Generally people have 3-4 parties they're close enough with to at least consider and 1-2 they prefer. When protesting they'll just switch to one of those, I did some years ago, and I haven't looked back. 6:08 Hum, there's pretty broad consensus in Norway on supporting Ukraine. Although there's some variation in the degree. One party was even against sending lethal weapons. As for climate... The 3 biggest parties are all on the gray side of the green - gray scale, but we only have one party questioning human caused climate change. The rest of the spectrum is more about how high to prioritize it. Those two topics is on opposite sides of the political spectrum in Norway. But if you want to move a little bit away from those extremes there's parties that bring aspects of both topics. Perhaps not both climate denial and refusal of Ukrainian aid, but lower priority to each, putting Norway first if that makes sense.
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@fruhlingsrolle7303 I don't think that the problem back then was having too many political parties. Rather I suspect it was that the big ones where too big and the small ones too small, if it makes sense? So there wheren't enough possible ways to combine the parties to form a government coalition. In our system in Norway 150 of the 169 seats have zero electoral threshold. Only 19 seats are actually subject to a 4% threshold giving smaller parties a incentive to merge, as being in the region of 4% can be a force multiplier for smaller political parties in our country while your vote isn't wasted if you have less then 4%. Does that make sense? So in Norway in our last parliamentarian election we had 10 political parties making it into our parliament. Red had 4,7% of the national votes and got 8 seats, the liberals had 4,6% and also 8 seats. 8 our of the 169 seats is about 4,7% of the seats. My own preferred party the greens had 3,9% of the votes but got 3 seats, or about 1,7% of the seats, yet our smallest party had 0,2% of the national votes (41,6% of the votes in their home region where they're fighting for a hospital accessible even in bad weather, and 12,7% in their home constituency as a whole) and also got 1 seat, or 1,69% of the seats with 0,2% of the national votes. So while parties above 4% is pretty damned close to the correct proportionality of seats given their percentage of the votes things gets weird below that since smaller parties rely on concentrated regional support to get seats, meaning that they can potentially get seats with very few voters if said voters are located in certain constituencies. Or if their voters are very spread out like the greens are you might struggle if you fail to make the 4% threshold. We'd probably have 6 seats if we had 0,1% more votes. Or twice as much as we have now. Something that mobilize our voters. But falling below 4% hasn't penalized us to the point where we don't have representation, we just didn't end up with enough to be relevant for coalition discussions this time around. Does that make sense?
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@fruhlingsrolle7303 Our system is one with 150 seats distributed among 19 constituencies based not just on population but also other factors like land area, ensuring representation from rural areas. Like the first past the post part of your system is intended to do. And seats are distributed based on the proportion of the votes in each constituency that said party gets. Then there's one extra seat pr constituency (the last 19 making our parliament 169 seats) that's reserved for parties with more then 4% of the votes and that's distributed based on the proportion of the votes the parties get at the national level, taking i to account what they already have from each of the 19 constituencies already, so if you have way less seats then you should based on your percentage of the votes you'll get some of these seats, if you have slightly more or exactly what you are meant to have you'll get non. And since there's a 4% threshold those 19 seats are enough to ensure a high degree of proportionality. Does all of that make sense to you? In a system with no thresholds at all you end up with votes being spoiled at parties too small to get even a single seat, what happened in the Weimar republic. If you have a threshold for all the seats you end up with just big parties and any party just below the threshold has their votes essentially spoiled making it really hard to get in for new parties. Our system makes it easy to get into our parliament and get some representation, and potentially the option of becoming a king maker if your seat is the one splitting the difference between two coalitions. But parties above the 4% threshold for the last 19 seats has a advantage and are more likely to be relevant in coalition negotiations while the margins have to be narrow indeed for smaller parties to end up in that situation, still it can happen. So a party with just 1 seat is still relevant, even if that's one seat represents 0,2% of the population. Indeed that party of 0,2% of the population actually managed to make the difference giving the parliament enough votes for a new tax on salmon farming recently that they wouldn't have without said party. The party that helped our government to get into power (it's a minority goverment) is more left wing and wanted far higher taxes (45%) on salmon, something that the industry though would be crippling, the other side wanted no taxes, but with just the right combination they managed a moderate tax (25%) that the industry says they can live with even if they're not happy with a new tax. (We have a tradition of taxing use of any natural resources within our territory, but salmon farmers where previously exempted for some reason, now they're not anymore, but they're also getting a compromise solution instead of a far left high tax similar to what the oil industry had to deal with, a tax that the fish farmers unlike the oil industry couldn't have dealt with as it would have lead to investments moving to other countries)
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