Why is the American president only allowed to sit for a maximum of 8 years?

Answer

The idea of ​​rotating mandates is actually very old and very essential to democratic systems. After all, the principle is that power must be shared, and that it should not remain with the same person for too long or for too long. Even if it is popular.

In Athens and in Sparta, there were legislative assemblies in which evicted participants could sit only once or twice for a year. For some mandates there were elections instead of drawing lots, and then the lifetime ban on repetition did not apply – one could be re-elected. In the Roman Republic, elected magistrates (such as tribune, consul, praetor) also had to be transferred permanently after their term, and there was even a system, the ‘cursus honorum’, which prescribed which offices from which age, in what order and with what breaks were available. But getting re-elected for the same was basically impossible.

Even today, in many countries, the number of board terms for the same person is limited. But usually successive terms are limited, not the total number of terms of one person. In Mexico, MPs, senators, and the president can serve for only one term. They can run for re-election, but then have to skip an election.

It is exceptional when the ban on re-election/re-drawing applies for life, so that a simple ‘pause’ in the mandate does not help. That has been the case for presidents of the United States since 1951. Since George Washington refused to run for a third consecutive term in 1797, all presidents after him also quit after two terms. That became an unwritten rule for 150 years. That rule was challenged three times

• Republicans Ulysses S. Grant (president in 1869-1873 and 1873-1877) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1905 and 1905-1909) narrowly failed to win a party nomination for a third presidential term
• The Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt managed to string together four terms as president: 1933-1937, 1937-1941, 1941-1945 and 1945.

After FDR’s death in 1945, at the beginning of his fourth term, Congress decided that Washington’s unwritten rule should still be written: In 1951, the 22nd Amendment established that no one can serve more than two terms as president. So for life, a break is not a solution to get re-elected.