Age of democratic deadlock will keep UK treading Brexit water
Fracturing of two-party systems and polarisation of politics make compromise hard to reach in many countries
Spain will hold an election for the fourth time in less than four years on November 10. But there is little prospect that any party will emerge with enough seats to break the country’s political deadlock.
There is a similar situation in Israel, where political parties are still struggling to form a government, after elections in September failed to resolve the stalemate that followed the April elections. So Israel now seems likely to end up staging three polls within one calendar year.
Welcome to the age of democratic deadlock. Countries call an election, only to find that it settles nothing. So they try again, but get the same inconclusive result.
This emerging pattern across the democratic world should be a concern for Britain’s politicians. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, has called an election for December 12, arguing that it is the only way to end years of Brexit-induced drift. But there is a strong possibility that the result will be another hung parliament, with no party able to form a stable government.
The Spanish and Israeli situations are extreme, but they are not unique. The fracturing of the German two-party system meant that it took five painful months to form a governing coalition, after the last elections in 2017.
It is true that the Spanish, Israeli and German systems all use proportional representation, which helps smaller parties. But first-past-the-post systems are not immune to democratic deadlock.
A US presidential election is guaranteed to produce a single winner. But the president is then often stymied by the US Congress the situation that in recent decades has led to successive government shutdowns in the US.
Each country’s situation has its own intricacies and complications. But there are two
general trends that may be leading democracies towards deadlock and both are present in Britain.
The first is the fracturing of two-party systems; the second is the polarisation of politics, with the re-emergence of the far-right and the far-left, and the growing salience of identity issues, which make compromise harder to achieve.
In Spain, the centre-right People’s party and the centreleft Socialists dominated politics in the decades after the restoration of democracy in 1975. However, the financial crisis of 2008 helped to shatter the two-party system, and the struggle over Catalan independence has widened the cracks. Spain now has a far-left party, Podemos; and a far-right party, Vox, as well as strong regional parties.
In Germany, the centre-right and centre-left parties took just 53% of the vote in the last election, down from about 65% of the vote in the election before that one, which was itself a reduction from
historic post-war norms.
It is a similar story in Israel. In the decades after independence, Israeli politics was dominated by the Labour and Likud parties, which had little difficulty in forming governments.
But in the most recent election the main right- and leftwing parties, Likud and Blue and White, both got about one quarter of the vote. They have a multitude of tiny parties to deal with, each with their own nonnegotiable demands.
It is not just the number of parties that matters; it is also their nature. The process of coalition-building and consensus-forming is made much harder by political
radicalisation. The rise of antisystem parties that are deemed to threaten democracy or the survival of the nation, narrows the number of potential governing partners for mainstream parties.
In Israel, the third-largest party is the Joint List of IsraeliArab parties, which even the centre-left dare not bring into government for fear of compromising their Zionist credentials. It is a similar story in Spain, where neither the Socialists nor the People’s party can form a coalition with the Catalan separatists.
In Germany, with its long tradition of coalition-building, the situation is less dire. But the formation of a national government is significantly complicated by the fact that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far-left Die Linke, between them command 160 of the 709 seats in parliament, and are deemed to be beyond the pale.
The danger for a country such as Britain is that some of the conditions leading to deadlocked democracies elsewhere are now emerging in the UK as well.
It is true that the last general election of 2017 saw a resurgence in the share of the vote taken by the two main parties, the Conservatives and Labour. But that trend is likely to be reversed this time, with both the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists gaining ground, and the Brexit party also eating into the Conservative vote.
Politics is also no longer dominated by economic questions. Instead, issues of identity, such as Brexit or Scottish independence, are on the rise in Britain too, with the effects seen elsewhere.
The opinion polls suggest that British people are genuinely fed up with deadlock and dither at Westminster. If Johnson sweeps to victory with a clear majority he will have a chance to get his Brexit deal passed, and then to govern too.
However, if the UK ends up with a hung parliament, Britain will look more like the deadlocked democracies of Spain and Israel.
Rather than heading off in the firm new direction promised by Johnson when he became prime minister, British politics may simply keep spinning on the hamster wheel of Brexit. /©
IDENTITY POLITICS RATHER THAN THE ECONOMY IS THE NEW DEAL OF DEMOCRACY, AND THE UK IS STARTING TO FEEL ITS EFFECTS
THE RISE OF ANTISYSTEM PARTIES SEEN TO THREATEN THE NATION’S SURVIVAL SHRINKS THE NUMBER OF POTENTIAL RULING PARTNERS