Germany has an electoral system that encourages for multiple parties to be represented in parliament, with a threshold at the 5%-mark to keep extremely small parties out, for the sake of simplicity.

Over the years, the political landscape has changed from 2 major parties calling the shots into a more diverse situation of 6 major parties, spanning the spectrum from far-left to far-right. As voters gravitate towards more parties, each party's individual percentage of votes shrinks, making it harder to get above the 50% needed for forming a government..... which is why coalition-governments have become the new standard.

As it is easiest for politically moderate parties to form a coalition, this has lead to a political stasis in Germany where, no matter really who wins the election, it's always the same parties who pool their parliamentary seats together into a coalition-government.

Another side-effect of this perpetual coalition-situation is that no party really gets to shine because everything is a middle-of-the-road negotiated compromise.

If the government does something good, nobody gets the credit.

If the government does something bad, everybody gets the blame.

This has lead to a situation in Germany where many people are now "protest-voting". They don't really care about what your policies are, as long as you are against the establishment.

For about 20 years, Germany's far-left party used to be the go-to vote if you want to vote against the establishment. Imagine the shock of their party-leaders when in 2021, HALF of their supposedly far-left voter-base just packed up and voted for the far-right anti-establishment party instead.

Germany has taken in a huge amount of war-refugees from the Middle-East and they aren't adapting to german cultural norms (e.g. women's rights and secular law being above Sharia law) very well, leading to various well-publicized scandals. This had made it easy for the far-right to not only pick up anti-establishment voters but also anti-immigrant voters.

In recent state-elections a few weeks ago, the far-right has made massive gains. In one state, Thuringia, they are the strongest party. They will maybe form the government, and even if they somehow don't, they have enough votes to filibuster any initiatives in parliament they don't like.

A portent of the dysfunction and havoc they will wreak was on display yesterday in the state-parliament of Thuringia:

By parliamentary procedure, the very first session when no roles and responsibilities have been assigned yet, is lead by the eldest member of parliament as a speaker-pro-tempore.

He happened to be a member of the winning far-right party AfD. And he wanted to hold the parliamentary vote for State-President, which the AfD-candidate most likely would have won. But the other members of parliament had hatched a plan to sabotage that: They offered a motion to vote on a change to parliamentary procedure, that would reduce the odds of the far-right candidate and increase the odds of the counter-candidates. (Basically they wanted to change the order in which the steps of the voting-process are performed, to make it easier to coordinate among themselves a loss for the right-wing candidate.)

THIS IS WHERE THE CONTROVERSY ERUPTED. In a breach of procedure, the speaker-pro-tempore refused to accept the motion, saying that motions can only be brought AFTER a State-President has been elected. Personally, I am not sure why he did that. Maybe it was malice and he wanted to ensure a victory for his party-pal, maybe it was incompetence and he doesn't know the rules. (In any way, I looked up the rules: He had no right to refuse the motion.)

The session devolved into chaos and had to be aborted. Right-wingers on the internet got BLOODY PISSED how "the establishment" had ruined their big moment and how they were totally in the right.

The state's highest court was called on to settle this, which they did just last night: The speaker-pro-tempore had no right to refuse the motion. His reasoning for refusing it had no legal basis.

Let's see what the next session will bring.

In any way, lots of hypocritical grandstanding and publicity-stunts by political arsonists lies ahead for Germany.