Our House of Representatives has 435 seats by law. The CIA Factbook says U.S. population is 295.7 Million while Germany's is 82.4 Million.
So, U.S. has roughly 3.5 times more people than Germany, with a much smaller body of legislators.
In fact, having the equivalent of Germany's lower house of parliment would mean we would have 2,872 Representatives in Washington D.C.! Can you imagine?
NOTHING would get done! And it would be really expensive as all get out to support these windbags...
Merkel came very close to pulling off the coalition.
In Germany you don't need 50 percent to have a majority in parliament because the andere got 4 percent and they didn't win any seats.
Merkel/fdp got around 46 percent and 48 percent would have put them over the top in parliament.
300 seats wre needed they got 282, the seats in parliament were much closer than the percentage. 9 seats going from schroader coalition to merkel coalition and there is no hung parliament.