Fractured parliaments, unstable coalitions and divided governments are the new normal, at a time when Europe least needs them

Just when Europe needed it least, a string of confusing and inconclusive elections this year – from Spain and Ireland to Slovakia and Portugal – has produced fractured parliaments, improbable and unstable coalitions, and weaker, more divided governments.

As countries struggle to shake off the eurozone’s financial crisis, migration and Islamist terror are overtaking the economy as most voters’ main concerns, magnifying deeper social changes that have seen support for mainstream parties plunge and anti-austerity, anti-EU or anti-immigrant populism surge across the continent.



Results from Germany’s March 13 regional polls, in which both Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Social Democrat “grand coalition” partners lost votes to liberals, Greens and above all the anti-immigrant AfD, suggest that even in Europe’s powerhouse, the federal elections of 2017 will mark an end to a culture of political stability that has lasted since the second world war.

“What we’re seeing is a growing fragmentation of the vote, on the left and on the right,” said Simon Hix, professor of European and comparative politics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “The mainstream parties of the centre-left and centre-right that could once rely on 40% of the vote are now reduced to 20 or 25%. It’s happening everywhere, and it can be massively problematic.”

In Slovakia, parliamentary elections on 6 March returned eight wildly different parties to parliament, including two from the far right. Prime minister Robert Fico and his centre-left Smer-SD party technically won, with 28% of the vote, but lost their majority.

After 10 days of negotiations, Fico cobbled together a shaky new coalition with the small right wing Slovak National party, the centre-right liberals and a party representing Slovakia’s Hungarian minority. But all were fiercely antagonistic during the election campaign and the new government looks riven with rivalries and disagreements.

Spain, meanwhile, whose voting system was designed after its return to democracy in the 1970s to deliver strong majorities and a stable two-party system, remains without a government nearly three months after it went to the polls on 20 December.

The ruling centre-right People’s party finished first on 29% – 16 points down on its 2011 score – while its traditional rivals, the centre-left PSOE, managed just 22%.

Two newcomers, the leftist populists of Podemos and the liberal reformists of Ciudadanos, polled 21% and 14%, producing a perfect political stalemate and leaving fresh elections in June as the most likely outcome.



Following inconclusive elections on 4 October, Portugal is now governed by a novel and fragile leftist alliance – the first since it became a democratic country four decades ago – of socialists, communists, greens and the left bloc that narrowly toppled a conservative minority government of just 11 days’ standing in a dramatic parliamentary vote.

Ireland’s elections on 26 February also followed the general direction, after prime minister Enda Kenny’s outgoing coalition lost its parliamentary majority as voters made their anti-austerity feelings clear.

The most obvious option might be a grand centrist coalition of Kenny’s Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – except that the two parties have been rivals since the 1920s.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fianna Fáil celebrates election results in Ireland. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

These most recent elections are not the only evidence of a fractured political landscape: Belgium’s present precarious administration, often referred to as “the kamikaze coalition”, was so difficult to assemble it was not sworn in for 138 days after elections in May 2014; in Sweden and Denmark, fraught minority cabinets survive at the whim of anti-immigration populists who hold the balance of power.



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Upcoming votes are unlikely to be any different. Besides Germany’s federal elections next year, polls in the Netherlands suggest that in the next parliamentary elections due in March 2017, the three traditional parties of Dutch government – the socialist PvdA, Christian democrat CDA and liberal VVD – will struggle to reach 40% of the popular vote between them. That is roughly the same share that any one of those parties might have expected to win on their own just a few years ago.

Analysts note that economic upheaval has long been known to erode consensus politics. A study of 800 elections over the past 140 years by Munich’s IFO institute found last year that, historically, “policy uncertainty rises strongly after financial crises, as government majorities shrink and polarisation rises”.

After a crisis, the study’s authors wrote, “voters seem particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners”.

On average, the study’s authors found, far-right parties increased their vote share by 30% in the five years following a financial crisis.

That has certainly been the case in western Europe and Scandinavia, where fragmentation is driving the rapid rise of radical anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the Danish People’s party and Germany’s AfD (Alternative für Deutschland).

In central and eastern Europe, more old-style nationalist, authoritarian, sometimes religious but essentially ultraconservative parties such as Poland’s Law and Justice and Hungary’s Fidesz have been propelled to power.

In the southern European countries hardest hit by the economic downturn – Spain, Portugal and Greece – post-2008 polarisation has largely favoured the far left rather than the far right, due essentially to their relatively recent experience of fascist rule.

But the result is nonetheless the same: across a continent, mainstream parties and alliances that once dominated national politics are in headlong retreat, making coalition-forming harder – even in countries long used to coalition government – and producing weak, potentially short-lived governments.



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Into this already unsettled picture has erupted the largest wave of refugees since the second world war, dramatically exacerbating a trend towards fragmentation that is now evident almost everywhere (although masked in Britain by a first-past-the-post electoral system which, unlike the proportional representation systems on much of the continent, makes it very difficult for smaller parties to break through nationally).

Political fragmentation matters because the flimsy governments and splintered legislatures that often result can make it far harder for countries to adopt tough domestic reforms or accept socially controversial policies – such as accepting large numbers of refugees.

Internationally, too, challenging but increasingly necessary reforms – to the eurozone’s rules, for example, or the EU’s asylum policy – become correspondingly more problematic.



“I see two possible scenarios,” Hix said. “Either Europe’s mainstream parties get used to this new world and start thinking seriously about ways to build entirely new kinds of broad-based coalitions.

“Or they don’t, in which case the outcome could be real political crisis, and even ungovernability.”