this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
9 points (84.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43963 readers
1249 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am actually quite happy with Germany's constitution.
What do you think about the role of your president? Would you get rid of them entirely, or would you give them more powers?
Keep them as they are. I don't think we've ever had this position seriously abused and it's a decent last line of defense ~~if~~when the brown shit hits the fan again.
Obviously they can't prevent the public hurting itself again in the long term but they can however at least mitigate that happening to some degree for a little while. That can be enough to smooth over some short-term crisis and might move people to realise their situation a bit better because it'd be a highly, highly exceptional thing for them to step in.
(For those not in the know: Next to being the representative for the state (does rememberance speeches, shakes hands, etc.), the German president handles some "administrative" stuff in the government without much say and they have the power to effectively stop the legislative until their term is over by refusing to sign new bills.
The latter has never occured and single bills have only been "vetoed" only 9 times in total. Mostly because of formal issues such as the bill not actually having been approved by the Bundesrat or bills that are obviously in conflict with the Grundgesetz and would get overturned by the judicative immediately.)
Agreed. I like how the German presidents have managed to keep an aura of respect (or so it at least seems to me) by staying out of daily politics. Here in Czechia the presidents have been quite vocal about their opinions which kind of defeated their role as a unifying head of state.