Reichstag (Weimar Republic)
|
Reichstag Deutscher Reichstag |
|
|---|---|
| Legislative body of the Weimar Republic | |
 |
|
| Type | |
| Type | |
| Chambers | |
| History | |
| Established | 1919 |
| Disbanded | 1933 |
| Preceded by | Weimar National Assembly |
| Succeeded by | Nazi Reichstag |
| Seats | 661 (at dissolution) |
| Elections | |
| Direct competitive elections | |
|
Last election
|
13 March 1938 |
| Meeting place | |
 |
|
| Reichstag building, Berlin | |
The Reichstag (English: Diet of the Realm) was a legislative body of Weimar Germany (the "German Reich") from 1919, when it succeeded the Weimar National Assembly, until the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Although German constitutional commentators consider only the Reichstag and now the Bundestag to be the German parliament, in fact since 1871 Germany has been governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Reichstag served as a lower house and the Reichsrat (after 1949 the Bundesrat) as the upper house. Constitutionally, the Reichsrat represented the governments of the federal German states.
According to the 1919 Weimar Constitution, the members of the Reichstag were to be elected by general universal suffrage according to the principle of proportional representation. Votes were cast for nationwide party lists. Elections were to be held at the end of a legislative session of four years. Because of some special requirements, there were still inconsistencies between the total share of votes received by a party and its share of the seats. Hitler was not in power yet.
There was no hard and fast threshold for winning a seat in the Reichstag. In practice, a party could do so with as little as 0.4 percent of the national vote—one seat for some 60,000 votes. While this provision was intended to reduce wasted votes, it also resulted in a large number of parties being represented in the chamber. Combined with the nationwide party-list system, this made it extremely difficult to form a stable government.
...
Wikipedia