countries In Poland's Sejm, Lithuania's Seimas, Germany's Bundestag and New Zealand's House of Representatives, the threshold is 5% (in Poland, additionally 8% for a coalition of two or more parties submitting a joint electoral list and in Lithuania, additionally 7% for coalition). However, in Germany and New Zealand, if a party wins a minimum number of directly elected seats—three in Germany and one in New Zealand—the threshold does not apply (in Germany the directly elected seats are kept regardless). The threshold is 3.25% in Israel's Knesset (it was 1% before 1992, 1.5% in 1992–2003 and 2% 2003–2014) and 7% in the Turkish parliament. In Poland, ethnic minority parties do not have to reach the threshold level to get into the parliament and so there is always a small German minority representation (at minimum, one member) in the Sejm. In Romania, for the ethnic minority parties there is a different threshold than for the national parties that run for the Chamber of Deputies. There are also countries such as Portugal, South Africa, Finland, the Netherlands and North Macedonia that have proportional representation systems without a legal threshold, although the Netherlands has a rule that the first seat can never be a remainder seat, which means that there is an effective threshold of 100% divided by the total number of seats (with 150 seats to allocate, this threshold is currently 0.67%). Australia For the Senate of Australia, which is elected through the single transferable vote (STV) form of proportional representation, the need for a formal electoral threshold is rendered moot due to the presence of small electorates that return comparatively few members to Parliament (and as such, they require a relatively high percentage of the vote (as determined through the Droop quota) in order to be elected). As STV is a ranked voting system, supporters of minor parties are not disenfranchised as their votes are redistributed to other candidates according to the individual's indicated 2nd and further preferences. Germany Germany, as mentioned earlier, has a regular threshold of 5%, but a party winning three constituency seats in the Bundestag can gain additional representation even if it has achieved under 5% of the total vote, and ethnic minority parties have no threshold. The 2021 election demonstrated both thresholds: The Left still qualified for list votes despite getting just 4.9%, because they held three direct mandate seats, and the South Schleswig Voters' Association entered