I’ve been writing now for several years about the political fragmentation of democratic politics. The most recent French and UK elections drive home this thesis with unmistakable clarity.
France, in particular, illustrates the perversity of how political fragmentation works. On the one hand, it is a response to the dissatisfaction with incumbent governments, the traditional major political parties, and with political leaders. On the other hand, it only makes democracies more ungovernable and unable to deliver on the issues many citizens care most about.
The rise of Macron itself reflected the collapse of the two major center-right and center-left parties in France. But these disruptive forces in politics do not take long before they themselves, in our era, become disrupted. A large, though completely divided, segment of France has now repudiated Macronism. Instead, the National Assembly has been left divided into three factions, none of which is itself close to being able to form a majority.
At this moment, it is entirely unclear whether France will be able to form a cross-party coalitional majority government, given the enormous differences between party positions that would have to be overcome. Since the creation of the 5th Republic in 1958, France has never had a National Assembly anywhere close to this divided. No matter what structure of governing France ends up with, the country is likely to be extremely difficult to govern and will have great difficulty meeting the major challenges the country faces.
Indeed, the entire structure of the 5th Republic was designed to avoid France falling into exactly this situation. France abandoned the proportional representation system of the 4th Republic precisely because PR had made the country ungovernable. The 4th Republic came to be known as an era of immobilism, for the inability to forge majorities to act on urgent issues. That’s why France has an independently elected President; uses single-member districts; and has runoff elections. Yet the forces of political fragmentation are so powerful, they have now overwhelmed all these institutional-design measures.
In the UK, the two major parties, Labour and Conservatives, combined to receive the lowest total share of the vote since 1923. They shed votes to the Liberal Democrats, the Farage-led Reform Party, and the Green Party. Indeed, most of the votes Conservatives lost did not go to the Labour Party; they went instead to the Liberals or to Reform.
While Labour gained 2/3rd of the seats with about 1/3rd of the vote, if the UK had PR, Labour would likely have to form a three-party governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens (see below). Of course, with PR, the vote share for these smaller parties would likely go up, as well. That would likely require significant policy concessions to those smaller parties, even though their vote share is relatively low.
The fragmentation in both France and the UK is all the more striking because this is happening in major non-PR countries. That highlights just how powerful the forces of fragmentation in democratic politics have become.
