Saddest political moment of the year: Bernie...

[quote=The_Nameless_Bard][quote=Ekki]On a slightly tangential note, I was told that the US president wasn't DIRECTLY chosen by the voters. So you kinda have a bunch of guys who choose the president and the amount of voters to each party defines the amount of guys from your party that will directly vote for the president. Is this true?[/quote]That is true. The electoral college ultimately decides who is president. A candidate can even win the popular vote and still lose the electoral college vote (and therefore the election), actually.[/quote]

[quote=TROLLing1999][quote=Embracing] There are a LOT of differences between the US's and EU's / EU member states' political systems. For starters, there's a fundamental difference in power allocation between a parliamentary system (EU, EU member states) and a presidential system (US) where the legislative and executive branches work against each other to pass policies, whereas in parliamentary systems the coalition or ruling party has full control over what they want to pass. I do think that Hillary and Trump are shit candidates like most of you do, but the U.S's political system and voting culture is completely different from the EU as a whole or its member states in the world. Knowing the differences it'd be best for an educated discussion if people spoke with more understanding of how the US functioned before looking at the US elections similarly as they do their own. uhhh? theres only like 3 member-states of the EU that have presidential or semi-presidential systems - the rest are parliamentary systems (including monarchies), not to mention that US presidents definitely do have less control over their own country compared to EU member-states's respective leaders, unless you're referring to global authority in which case I have no clue what you're trying to get at.[/quote] We're basically saying the same thing. I do see that my statement may be unclear but I was actually referring to the political title of the president in the EU member-states and not each nation's political leader. As you pointed out, there a very few political systems in the EU, in which the president has actual authority. Note though, that even in non-parliamentary systems, there (usually) is a president(not to be confused with prime minister, chancellor etc.) with a primarily symbolic role similar to that of most monarchs. Examples are Greece, Germany and some more. What I meant with "a whole different story" is that even though presidents in parliamentary systems are in most cases not elected by the people, it barely matters since they do not have any major political duties. I am not going to address the matter of US' political system and its ideological basis because we are probably going to have a disagreement due to different cultural backgrounds.[/quote]