Progression of Government
The first organized government in Germany was the Holy Roman Empire. Empires were a common form of government at the time. The Holy Roman Empire was driven by the Catholic faith, so when Martin Luther led the Reformation, the government began to falter with religious disputes leading to rebellion. The next major governing body was the German Empire, which as it sounds, was another Empire. This form of government lasted until World War I. Leading up to World War I, Germans were starting to dislike the system of government. During the War, members of the German Navy staged a mutiny because they had grown tired of the Kaiser and wished for an end to the war. The loss of World War I proved to be a tipping point for the German Empire, and the German Revolution ensued. The Revolution had been partially instigated by the Communists who supported the Bolsheviks. Tensions rose between the Communists and the Reactionaries, and a civil war may have broken out had the Weimar Republic not been implanted as a sort of compromise. However, the Weimar Republic did not mark the end of monarchy in Germany. Only a few years after the creation of the new regime, it toppled when Hitler was given unrestricted legislative rights following the burning of the Reichstag. Germany once again became a monarchy, but this time it was a totalitarian dictatorship. After World War II, for the third time in thirty years, Germany endured another change in Government.
President Reagan's famous speech urging the demolition of the Berlin Wall
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After the War, Germany was not seen as fit to govern itself, so the major Allied Powers occupied it. The three Western Nations installed a Parliamentary Republic, while the Soviet Union created a Communist Regime. Eventually, because of a woeful living standard in the East and a weakened Soviet Union, Germany reunified. The new Germany kept the government and economic policies of the West because they had helped reinstate West Germany as a world power. In the current system, there are regulations that limit the possibility of an extremist political party. One of the mot prominent of these regulations is the law that a political party must garner five percent of the total vote in order to receive any seats in the Bundestag. This does not allow extremist parties to spread or enforce their ideas.
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