Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Germany Sabotages the EU's Plan to BAN Combustion Engines" video.
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@derdude6214 Well, to put it this way, Norway has a population of 5,5 million, a parliament of 169 members and 10 political parties are currently represented.
There's no minimum requirement for percentage of the votes etc for 150 of the 169 seats.
And those 150 seats are distributed between the 19 fylker we used to have prior to a recent reform merged several of them, we're still using the old subdivision for the elections though.
The seats are distributed both based on population and land to ensure that rural people and minorities are well represented.
If you have 30% of the votes in one of those 19 "fylker" but say 3% nationally you get 30% of the seats from that "fylke".
And then you win seats in various other fylker based on how many votes you get there.
Then we have 19 leveling seats that's kind of like the proportional seats in Germany in that there is a 4% limit to be eligible for those 19 seats and they're won based on all the votes and makes the number of seats pr party more proportional.
But since there's 1 leveling seat pr fylke you still get more regional representatives even if the voters actually getting a party said leveling seat is located somewhere else in the country.
As a result our election results are more proportional then the German MMP system and far more proportional then the British or American first past the post electoral system.
However we're intentionally less proportional then the Dutch system for instance.
The reason for that is that if you take two regions, one with say a city of 100 000 people and a few villages all around that city and compare it to a region with perhaps 80 000 people spread out over 80 different villages the likelihood of that city with 100 000 people having someone representing them in any given election outcome is pretty high, but the likelihood of any of those villages having a representative is low even if those 80 000 voters ends up being worth more then the 100 000 in the city.
And quite frankly if you have 2-3 representatives from that city already and the city took part in choosing some of the representatives that represents those villages anyway you still end up with most political views and experiences and of that city represented fairly often.
You'll have someone who knows how it's like living there.
It doesn't make a huge difference if there's 5-6 representatives from that city.
How it is to live there is still taken into consideration when making policies.
While for those villages even with added power given to their region they'll not be represented most years.
That's the logic behind why you guys use first past the post for some of your seats and proportionality for other seats.
But the difference is that our system doesn't distort the proportionality nearly as much and is better at representing smaller political parties.
Unusually this year a new party won a seat with just 4 908 votes, won because a hospital was going to be closed and that would result in half the population of the region with our Sami minority and the lowest population per square km being on the wrong side of a mountain from the closest hospital afterwards.
A mountain that's impassable in bad winter weather by both car and air ambulance.
Something they obviously where somewhat upset about.
Having our system allows us to have a seat winnable with less then 5 000 votes despite the average number of votes pr representative in Norway being 17 200 and my party having 36 700 votes pr our seats.
This kind of distortions only exists for smaller parties (under 4% of the votes) once you get past that our system is really, really proportional.
And it's proportional between the parties even when rural areas gets more seats.
Basically, the idea that all votes should be equal is inherently undemocratic in my view and inherently favours high population density areas.
Take the Rhine valley for instance.
It has over twice the population of my whole country.
Yet non of them know how it is to live somewhere where private public transportation, private health care, private education, private post services etc simply isn't viable due to low population.
Non of them know how it is to live in a country where only 3% of the land is suitable for agriculture, 1% suitable for grain and neither works most of the year due to the climate...
A country where our last conflict with a naval power literally lead to food shortages and borderline starvation as the Brits where blockading our coast during the Napolionic wars...
And we're even more vulnerable now then then with the increased population...
It would be unfair for those 5 000 or so voters in Norway to actually decide what laws people in the Rhine valley has to live by.
Urban areas should have more power then rural people, simply because we're more people.
But we already do because of our population.
But laws that affect others shouldn't be made by people who don't know the conditions of those who have to live under those rules.
And no representatives from the Rhine valley as a example could ever do so with regards to rural areas in Norway or Switzerland etc.
With veto power you're still able to enforce all of those laws as individual countries, but you're not forcing laws that's not viable onto others.
And for the record, a federated Europe would be inherently undemocratic for the simple reason that it's impossible to make a a large democracy function well.
And a confederate model is the only method that's fair towards everyone.
Federal being a too down model where the highest level grants power down, a confederal model is a bottom up system where the lower levels have all the power and willingly gives some away in specific situationa, but still ultimately has the final say themselves.
We've spent about 500 years in various unions, they didn't work out all that well for us...
No federation or other union is going to be a good option for us for many centuries I think...
But the basic principles still applies.
And I'm not just saying that to benefit us...
Norway is currently in a similar dilemma of our own.
We've (happily) signed treaties and laws that gives our ethnic minorities, the Sami, the Kven, the Forest Finns, the Romani and the Roma certain rights.
That's intended to protect their culture.
In the case of the Sami the ones along the coast and lived of fishing and farming has mostly been assimilated into the Norwegian culture, so what remains is mainly the semi-nomadic raindeer herders living in areas we haven't really been able to utilize much, our highlands etc.
And that raindeer herding is a important part of their culture, and it contributes to keeping their language alive.
The Sami have multiple languages as they're technically not one people but several closely related ones.
The northern Sami culture is thriving.
But the south Sami culture is endangered.
So our government is obligated to take them into consideration when making decisions.
One such decision was granting building permit to build some windfarms on a Norwegian peninsula.
The first ones where built with the consent of the local Sami raindeer herders (but reduced the available winter grazing grounds a bit from what I understand)
Then another permit was given...
This time against the will of the local Sami who took this to court.
The authorities hasn't taken into consideration that unlike our animal husbandry they're not using the same grazing grounds all year round...
And that the raindeers are animals that don't change easily...
They literally walk the same paths for 10 000 years, and the Sami just followed them...
But they're also skittish and often won't cross human roads or walk close to our windmills...
So when our bureaucrats looked at the available grazing grounds and though that's more then enough and gave a building permit when all of those grazing grounds are summer ones except the one being destroyed by the windmills...
Yeah, that didn't fly in our supreme court...
So now our government has ro work out what to do with windmills producing 3% of all our power worth billions of NOK while also following up on the decision by the supreme court that we're violating the human rights of our Sami raindeer herders by destroying those winter grazing areas...
(The original windmills that they consented to is also included as building them meant that the raindeer herders didn't have any winter grazing areas to fall back on, and also because this whole issue caused ethnic tension since there's still people alive who remember the time when the Norwegian government suppressed the Sami culture...)
Anyway, the needs of the many sometimes needs to make way for the needs of the few.
And if you want universal solutions you need the input of *everyone*.
That's why a veto is important...
The only reason why I'm begrudgingly accepting that a alternative is needed is because that veto is being abused by authoritarian leaders who really are not representing their whole people.
If Poland doesn't want to permit gay marriages etc I'll deeply dissagree with the, but ultimately that should be their choice.
Areas where I don't feel like Europe should go along with them though is on basic democratic principles...
They should be allowed to be undemocratic if they want, but not while being members of the EU.
Rule of law, freedom of the press and freedom of speech etc should be nonnegotiable among members...
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@derdude6214 No, local figures is one of my objections to the German system.
Focusing on individuals ends up distracting from the politics.
You get more of a popularity contest instead of voting so much on the direction you want your country to go in.
Our system is 100% party list based.
However candidates can be listed on multiple lists (if said lists permit it), and voters can change the lists in the boot, changing the order, adding people from other parties or removing people, although such changes are only taken into consideration if enough voters for a particular list actually make a change.
But especially in local elections it's common for lists to run on individual policies with members of multiple different parties included while they also run on their regular party list if they wish.
Some autonomy can never be enough.
Especially because it makes the federation vulnerable against a federal level that gets frustrated with local authorities and increase their own power at the cost of the local ones.
Especially dangerous in the case of authoritarian leaders.
No, it has to be the other way around.
Also, a federal level politician can never know what is or isn't important for local governments to decide.
In our case capitalism itself works worse because there isn't a viable market for many services that we still need due to lack of population density.
And that has been a problem in recent years since the EU has been lead by right wing politicians for a long time now, and we've been forced to implement capitalist policies that works fine in the high population density areas of the EU, but just doesn't out here in rural Norway.
Our postal services for instance is significantly worse after the EU decided that privatization of postal services was required...
Likewise train services on some routes have become significantly worse.
That said, there are others that's actually doing fairly well (we're not entirely without urban areas).
In Norway it's not the government but individual parliamentarians that propose laws, the ministers in the government just being some of them, but laws are proposed and enforced by the opposition as often as by the government as there's different majorities on a case by case basis.
There's even been cases of the far right and far left proposing and voting on laws together that they've managed to get passed.
If a party supported the governing coalition without being members of said coalition they're free to vote however they like on all the proposals (usually the agreement includes a promise to support the first budget after the election though).
If a party is a member of a coalition themselves they'll negotiate a platform with their partners making deals about supporting each other in certain legeslations etc, however anything not included in those coalition negotiations they're free to vote however they like, although the prime minister may talk to the leaders in the member parties on a case by case basis and they in turn may enforce certain voting or behavior in public in order to make life easier for the coalition, the cost of not following such rules is potentially losing your membership in a party, but you'll still be a representative in parliament till the end of the term even if you leave or change party, as long as you don't break the law.
And that's another objection, no one party should have enough power to dominate any region.
Our biggest political party had 26,3% of the national votes, and 48 out of 169 seats for instance in our last national election.
CDU being biggest in 50% of the regions shouldn't mean that they automatically get 50% of the votes there.
Nor should 50% of the regions consenting be enough, as 50% still means that you may ignore huge differences and such a majority may be able to enforce laws that's seriously harmful.
Norway is unitary, with our parliament having the last say rather than local governments.
But our system means that it's relatively easy for rural communities to change the makeup of said parliament.
You don't need to get a majority in any of those locations, even being top 5 political parties there will often get you a seat.
I agree that it's a bad decision on Germanys part, especially because Germany is more then capable of competing when it comes to EVs
Tesla is making a profit with their EV sales, non of the big traditional car companies are doing so yet, but all the ones that's close to do so are German.
If this had passed Germany would have a huge advantage, especially on the European market.
And I think that in the long run you'd probably our scale even the Chinese and Tesla.
But even so, in this case, we're still able to enforce these laws on a country by country basis.
Here in Norway we're already in the high 80s when it comes to EVs market share in percentage...
And that's excluding plug in hybrids and hybrids, just pure EVs.
I'm glad that it's just a hypothetical.
Honestly in a ideal world I'd prefer every country in the world being small countries with a population of roughly Iceland but cooperating in supernatural confederations.
Yes, it would probably cause all sort of headaches, but it would be worth it I feel.
Yes, that would involve Norway being split up too.
Definitely not going to happen, but yeah...
As for the weather.
Nah, it's nice right now.
But my gosh didn't snow a lot the last two days.
My region received the most snow in a night that we've had in 60 years. (We've had more snow accumulate before over longer time, and we have had more snow in a night over 60 years ago, so it's not a record.
But I definitely haven't seen this much falling this fast... Barely managed to get out due to the snow blocking the door, and broke my shovel trying to get rid of the damned snow, thankfully my neighbor helped me out, so we managed to get to the store before running out of food...)
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@derdude6214 Alright, sorry about writing his name wrong. -_-
There's some differences between the various Nordic countries.
But the basic idea is that there's electoral circles with a single seat.
Like Germany we have electoral circles overlapping other ones.
The two option thing you mentioned.
You have the country divided up into single seat constituencies with basically the same first past the post system as in the UK applying there.
So if you have 10 political parties each getting 10% of the votes but one party has a single more vote then the others that one seat goes ro that party (100% of that single seat constituency) even if 8 of the 10 political parties are fundamentally against the values of that one party.
So for instance if AfD gets 10% of the votes + 1 they'll get that seat even if all the other parties with 10% where to be left leaning.
The difference between the German system and the British system is that those single seat constituencies also overlap multi member constituencies.
So if you have 10 single seat constituencies and 10 seats shared in the multi member constituency overlapping them then the parties will get those 10 multi-member seats proportionally based on the percentage of votes they got but taking into account the number of seats they already got in the single seat constituencies.
That means that in the above example of AfD getting 10% of the votes they'd get 10 seats because they had 10% + 1 vote while the other parties would get 1 seat each.
Despite AfD literally only having 10 more votes in total they get half the seats in this theoretical example.
The idea with the single seat constituencies is that with fewer seats you can allow smaller constituencies in theory giving people more local agency.
But in practice such single seat constituencies tends to favour larger parties as they're more likely to tip that threshold of getting that + 1 vote, potentially leading to some voter apathy, although it's not as extreme as in the anglophone world with their first past the post systems.
5% is also a really difficult threshold to pass making it harder for smaller parties to break though and get recognition, meaning that you're more likely to just get regional or ethnic parties.
I'm guessing that you have parties for Danes, Frisians and that Slavic minority you guys have that I don't remember the name of right now?
They have a chance of building up enough local support to break though and get a seat, but are unlikely to get wider support.
Discouraging smaller parties from forming is a way for the big two to hold onto power by making it difficult to really challenge them or the status quo.
The difference between the German system and the Nordic ones is that instead of single member constituencies being overlapped by a larger multi-member constituency we have multi-member constituencies at all levels.
So instead of a green party candidate in your example for that local level and a SPD candidate at a higher level we just use a party list and vote for one list.
That list then wins seats in the more local smaller constituencies and then you also win seats in the bigger constituency as well taking into account the seats won locally.
But since the local seats already ate more proportional we need fewer seats at a higher level to correct the difference in proportionality at a higher level from at the lower level.
That bigger electoral circle in our case is our countries, but it could be a state too.
In theory you could have multiple stacking electoral circles.
So a German state could have several constituencies with a few members each, then there might be those leveling seats, the higher level multi-member constituency for the German state then above that you could have leveling seats for all of Germany.
And since each level is proportional you'd need few leveling seats at each level to correct the proportionality, while still ensuring local representation.
To achieve this just merge a few of your single seat constituencies.
Now the part about not having any lower limit for a seat is a Norwegian unique feature.
Having a limit of some kind is useful to avoid the fracturing of politics that Germany experienced between the world wars where you essentially ended up with many votes being wasted by going to parties so small that they had no real influence and no way of countering bigger parties like the fascists who where less fractured.
Having some incentive towards working together instead of endlessly splitting over minor Issues is a advantage over the system in the Weimar republic.
While we still allow parties that split or new parties that start from scratch to have a real chance of getting representation by not having a formal limit, meaning that real issues can be dealt with.
The number of seats that a electoral circle/constituency have of course matters in this regard as you'll need enough votes to beat a party for one of those seats.
So in my earlier example where one party got a seat with about 5 k voters they represented Finnmark.
Finnmark had 5 seats in that election and 39 299 people voted there that year (as you can probably tell they have a low population, part of why they have so many seats is that they have a lot of land and that also gives seats in our system)
4 of those 5 seats where given based on how people in Finnmark voted.
We use a modified Sainte-Laguë method for distributing seats.
So with the biggest party in Finnmark being labour with 31,4% of the votes in Finnmark (26,1% nationally).
And given that 39 299 voters voted they presumably got about 12 000 votes, give or take.
The regular Sainte-Laguë method would be to take those votes and divide it by 2x the number of seats they already have in that electoral circle + 1
(The+1 thing is to avoid ending up in a situation where you're dividing with zero if no seats have been distributed yet, so about 12 000 votes dividend on two times zero seats + 1 is 12 000 / 1 = 12 000 = bigger then any other party, so they get the first seat.
Next time this is calculated they'd have 12 000 divided by two times 1 is 2 plus 1 is 3, while another party would have a bigger number after that calculation..
The Sainte-Laguë method tends to favour smaller parties rather than larger ones giving smaller parties slightly more representation then exact proportionality.)
Because we use a modified version instead of dividing on 1 -> 3 -> 5 -> 7 -> 9 etc we use 1,4 as the first number instead of 1, so 12 000 / 1,4
Using 1,4 instead of 1 makes it slightly harder to get that first seat for smaller parties once the bigger parties get their seats, since the difference between 1,4 and 3 is smaller, so it's easier to get a second seat vs another party on the verge of getting their first then if we used just 1.
As a result we actually have pretty good proportionality in our system as our modification kind of removes some the bias towards smaller parties in the Sainte-Laguë method (voters divided on two x number of seats + 1) without giving the bias towards bigger parties in the d'Hondt method (voters divided on number of seats + 1)
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