For years, German politics were both mocked and admired for being too uneventful to the point of tedium. “We sometimes forget that the Weimar Republic only had 10 years to mature and develop,” said Thomas Mergel, a historian at Berlin’s Humboldt University. It is not impossible to conceive that newcomers like Bayaz could end up ushering in a German minority government after all. One of the hangovers of the Weimar Republic is that a president cannot call a snap election without making parliament vote in a chancellor first. THE WEIMAR YEARSBorn amid the chaos following the first world war, the Weimar Republic lasted, unofficially, from 1919 to 1933 and struggled to cope with extremism, hyperinflation and resentment at Germany’s treatment by the war’s victors.

Source: The Guardian November 25, 2017 20:26 UTC