The Chancellor is responsible for policy guidelines. This means he, or she, sets the broad ideas of what the government will do. To help carry out these ideas the Chancellor can change the make-up of the federal ministries whenever they want. For example, in the middle of January 2001, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture was renamed to Ministry of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture. This was to help fight the "Mad Cow Disease" BSE problem. At the same time some of the jobs ("competences") of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Health were moved to the new Ministry of Consumer Protection.
Reporting to the cabinet is the Civil service of Germany.
The duties of the "Bundespräsident" (Federal President) are mostly representative and ceremonial; The power of the executive is exercised by the Chancellor.
The President is elected every 5 years on May 23 by the Federal Assembly ("Bundesversammlung"). The Bundesversammlung only meets to elect the President. Its members are the entire "Bundestag" and an equal number of state delegates selected especially for this purpose in proportion to election results for the state parliaments.
In February 2017, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the SPD was elected. The reason that the President is not directly elected by the people is to stop him from claiming to be more powerful than the government and the constitution, which happened in the Weimar Republic.
Germany has a bicameral legislature, that means that the parliament has two houses. The "Bundestag" (Federal Diet) has at least 598 members, elected for a four-year term. Half of the members (299) are elected in single-seat constituencies according to first-past-the-post. The other 299 members are chosen from statewide party lists.
The total percentage of constituency members and regional list members a party has should equal the percentage of votes that a party gets. This is called proportional representation.
Because Voters vote once for a constituency representative, and a second time for a party Germany is said to have mixed member proportional representation.
Sometimes a party already has more constituency seats in a "land" (state) than it should have to keep the percentage of votes and seats equal. The party does not lose seats. Instead it gets no land seats. This means that the Bundestag sometimes has more than 598 members. In the current parliament there are 16 overhang seats, giving a total of 614.
A party must get 5% of the national vote or win at least three constituency seats to be represented in the "Bundestag". This rule, often called the "five percent hurdle", was made to stop lots of small parties being in the Bundestag. Small parties were blamed for the problems of the Weimar Republic's Reichstag.
The first "Bundestag" elections were held in the Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany") on August 14, 1949. Following reunification, elections for the first all-German "Bundestag" were held on December 2, 1990. The last election was held on September 24, 2017, the 19th Bundestag met on October 24, 2017.
The "Bundesrat" (Federal Council) is the representation of the state governments at the federal level. The Bundesrat has 69 members who are delegates of the 16 "Bundesländer". Usually the 16 Ministers President are members, but they do not have to be. The "Länder" each have from three to six votes in the "Bundesrat", depending on population. "Bundesrat" members must vote as their state government tell them.
The legislature has powers of exclusive jurisdiction (it can make laws by itself) and concurrent jurisdiction with the "Länder" (the länder can also make laws). What laws and what type of laws are set out in the Basic Law.
The "Bundestag" does most law making.
The "Bundesrat" must concur (agree) to laws about money shared by the federal and state governments and those making more work for the states. Often this means that the "Bundesrat" often needs to agree to a law, because federal laws are often carried out by state or local agencies.
Since the political make-up of the "Bundesrat" is often different from that of the "Bundestag", the Bundesrat is often the place for opposition parties to put their point of view, rather than for the states to look after their interests, as the constitution intended.
To limit, members of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat form a Vermittlungsauschuss which is a joint committee to try to reach agreement when the two chambers can not agree on a certain piece of legislation.
The following parties are represented in the German Bundestag since the federal elections of 2017:
Total 709 seats.
The Pirate Party Germany and the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) got no seats.
The Federal Council is composed by representatives of the State governments.
Germany has had a court system that was free of government control for longer than it has had democracy.
This means that the courts have traditionally been strong, and almost all state actions are subject to judicial review (being looked at by the court).
There is the "ordinary" courts system that handles civil and criminal cases
This has four levels
There is also a system of specialist courts, that deall with certain areas of the law. These generally have a state court and state appeals court before coming to the federal supreme court for that area of law. The other federal supreme courts are
Unlike the United States, all courts are state courts, except for the top level supreme courts.
Germany also has another supreme court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht Federal Constitutional Court. The "Grundgesetz" says that every person may complain to the Federal Constitutional Court when his or her constitutional rights, especially the human rights, have been violated by the government or one of its agencies, and after he or she has gone through the ordinary court system.
The Bundesverfassungsgericht hears complaints about laws passed by the legislative branch, court decisions, or acts of the administration.
Usually only a small percentage of these constitutional complaints, called "(Verfassungsbeschwerden)" are successful. Evenso, the Court is often angers both the government and the law-makers. The judges even say that they do not care about the reactions of the government, the Bundestag, or public opinion or about the cost of one of the court's decisions. All that matters is the constitution.
The Bundesverfassungsgericht is very high popular with ordinary people, because it protects them from government wrongdoing.
Only the Constitutional Court can handle some types of cases, including arguments between government bodies about their constitutional powers.
Only the Constitutional Court has the power to ban political parties for being unconstitutional. However so far the Constitutional court has only used this power twice, outlawing the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and the SRP (Socialist Reich Party, a successor to the NSDAP) because both parties ideas went against the constitution.
In the 1998 election the SPD said they wanted to reduce high unemployment rates and said new people were needed in government after 16 years of Helmut Kohl's government.
Gerhard Schröder said he was a centrist "Third Way" candidate like Britain's Tony Blair and America's Bill Clinton.
The CDU/CSU said people should look at how well off they were because of Kohl's government, and that the CDU/CSU had experience in foreign policy.
But the Kohl government was hurt at the polls by slower growth in the east in the previous two years, which meant the gap between east and west widened as the west got richer and the east did not.
The final seat count was enough to allow a "red-green" coalition of the SPD with Alliance '90/The Greens ("Bündnis '90/Die Grünen"), bringing the Greens into a national government for the first time.