From political representation to organic identification
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The emergence of the “State of Political Parties” after the German Constitution of Weimar of 11 November of 1919 launched an intense debate in Germany regarding its compatibility with the liberal principle of parliamentary representation. This new scenario implied to set aside the binding mandate and to start the path towards the representative mandate based on the concept of national sovereignty. Moreover, the representative mandate took away the control of the elected from the hands of the elector. This new paradigm was severely contested and several scholars pointed out the crisis of the parliamentary system. They sustained the existence of an insurmountable contradiction between the binding mandate and the institutionalization of the party discipline. The German Constitution of Weimar, with the constitutionalization of political parties and the proportional electoral system, pushed German constitutional scholars to replace the concept of political representation by a new one, the so-called organic identification. The political parties will not belong any more to civil society because they will now be considered public institutions essential for the operation of the State. The vanishing of representation in the “modern State based on Political Parties and radically egalitarian” –as it was defined by the German constitutional judge Gerhard Leibholz– should open the debate about the new principles in which the representative democratic system must be based on, taking into account that this system is currently the most common form of government in the world. If we sustain the nonexistence of political representation in a parliamentary system of government based on political parties and the principle of electoral proportionality, we need a deep reflection at the constitutional level, especially when political representation is a condition for democracy, as a guarantee of the collective political freedom, like Antonio García-Trevijano and Tocqueville has sustained. The election of the representatives of our public administrations –the State, the Autonomous Communities and Local Entities– are based on a pure proportional electoral system (D’Hondt) and the operation of political parties and, therefore, the analysis of this system is paramount.