[kqr]

Since you did not mention it specifically, I'll mention that term limits are suspected to be an important part of keeping a reasonable concentration of power and not having a democracy devolve into a dictatorship.

On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not, IIRC, have term limits and that seems to work fine for them. So maybe being able to remove term limits is a symptom more than a cause?

Either way, questions like these are discussed in the book How Democracies Die, which has been recommended to me and is on my re-read list, but which I haven't gotten to yet.

[wuschel]

> On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not [...] habe term limits

In fact, there is a limit: A German citizen might hold the office of Chancellor ("Kanzler", or "Kanzlerin" for female form) four times, or sixteen years in total.

[tharkun__]

And 4 times 4 is quite long actually. That is 16 long years and the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, is actually the 'brain child' of previous 16 year chancellor Helmut Kohl, with just a brief intermittence of Gerhard Schroder in between. For non-observers of the German political parties, Kohl and Merkel are from the 'regular' conservative party (CDU), while Schroder was from the SPD, the regular left or 'working people's party'. Of course after being chancellor he became an advisor for Russian Gazprom... A lot of Germany heats with (Russian) natural gas.

https://www.trtworld.com/europe/merkel-helmut-kohl-s-little-...

Kohl: 1 October 1982 - 27 October 1998

Schroder: 27 October 1998 - 22 November 2005

Merkel: 22 November 2005 - whenever Corona ends I suppose. Thuringia already postponed their state elections from April to September because of Corona.

[TheCoelacanth]

I suspect that term limits are less important with a parliamentary system since the head is typically somewhat less powerful than a president.

[kqr]

Contributing factors also include, I suspect, more independence for individual subdivisions, e.g. states in the US or Bundesländer in Germany unless I'm mistaken.