How do I explain it to my child ?: Why there are so many small parties

Some people who go to the Bundestag election on September 26th may be surprised: You can not only vote for six parties, but for 47!

The news is all about the six “big” parties that already sit in the Bundestag and make the political decisions - there are more small parties than ever before in Germany.

But why actually?

What do the numerous small parties want and why are they important?

In any case, they are not lacking in ideas: The European party “Love”, for example, wants only people with a “heart full of love and kindness” to become politicians, and it wants to pay wedding rings and festive clothes for wedding couples.

The satirical party “The Party” even wants to introduce a law for cheap alcohol and shoot plastic waste into space to save the climate.

If that is too silly for you, there is also a wide range of other small parties on offer that are committed to animal welfare or better care for the elderly, for example.

From the street to the Bundestag

Changing something in a big country like Germany is not that easy. If you want your opinion to be made public, at best you will find allies and join forces. This is what happened in 1990 with “Bündnis 90”, a small party made up of several groups, including many students, who campaigned against war and nuclear power. Everyone starts small, but can grow: only three years later, in 1993, the "Bündnis 90", united with the Greens, moved into the Bundestag as the "Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen" party - where it is represented to this day . Organizing yourself as a small party also has several advantages.

On the one hand, you can put pressure on the big parties.

This can be seen well in the current climate protection movement, for which many schoolchildren take to the streets.

In the meantime, many new small parties such as the “climate list” are campaigning for more environmental protection.

The big parties are also feeling this trend and have to come up with better concepts for climate protection if they do not want to lose any more votes to the small parties.

This is why the small parties are also referred to as the “driving force” for the country.

Every vote counts

Only very few of the forty small parties can hope for a success story like that of the “Greens” in this federal election. In order to enter the Bundestag, they need a full five percent of all votes in the election. If you calculate how many Germans are likely to vote (45 million), that's over two million votes required.

This “five percent hurdle” may be a bit too big a goal for many small parties.

Another hurdle is important to their work, which is another reason to found a party for your ideas.

If a party gets 0.5 percent of the vote, it receives some money from the state for each vote.

0.5 percent, that doesn't sound like much, but it's just under 300,000 people.

Convincing this crowd of voters is a big step for small parties, because campaigning like this is expensive and many members volunteer in their free time.

All interests should be represented

The small parties benefit from the fact that for years more and more Germans have been considering putting their crosses in a different party than in the last election. In the upcoming federal election, according to the current “Germany trend”, almost one in ten could imagine voting for a micro-party.

In addition, small parties have the advantage that they can often only devote themselves to one topic. While the big parties that want to govern should have an answer ready on pensions, the climate, education and all sorts of big questions, the small "animal welfare party", for example, can concentrate entirely on its only topic. This fulfills an important function, because in Germany we live in a democracy - according to which the interests of all people should be represented by the parties. Anyone who is dissatisfied with the animal welfare plans of the major parties could be represented by the "Animal Welfare Party".

Perhaps none of the forty small parties will move into the Bundestag in this election.

Even so, even the smallest party can influence the big parties or grow bigger themselves: all it takes is a good idea.