Germany has proportional representation. If there are two big parties, each with 47.5% of the legislature, then a party with 5% can claim a pretty high price to make one of the two parties the top dog.
In theory, yes, but that's not how it works in real life. In a multi-party system (as opposed to a two-party system), one party rarely (if ever) gets that big a share of the votes. To form a government, the party with the most votes will try to form a coalition with one or more of the other major parties, not just to create a majority, but to create as big a majority as possible -- which means broader support for the government.
Let me use last January's national elections for the Dutch Congress here as an example. The results (in number of seats, total = 150):
CDA : 44 SP : 9 D66: 6 PvdA: 42 LPF : 8 CU : 3 VVD : 28 GL : 8 SGP: 2
The winner (CDA -- Christian-Democrats) is politically a lot closer to the VVD (Liberals) than it is to the PvdA (Labour). It also shares viewpoints with the CU and SGP (two small very right-winged Christian parties). Given all the shared viewpoints among these four, it would make sense for them to form a coalition; this would give them 77 seats. However, the CDA didn't do that, but is now working on forming a coalition with Labour -- which will give the coalition 86 seats.
Jeroen "Political Observations" van Baardwijk
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