Coalition politics has turned European democracy into a beige dictatorship

A Grand Coalition is not healthy and should be rejected. Parties need to adapt or be swept away

We’ll find out soon whether Germany’s Social Democrats will join their Christian Democrat rivals in yet another Grand Coalition. Angela Merkel says that such a deal is necessary to bring “stability” to both Germany and Europe. But “stability” here is simply another word for “no change”. Friends of Germany, and of German democracy, should hope that the deal is rejected.

It is not healthy, in any country, for most of the parties to be in office most of the time. In Germany, the two big parties have shared power for eight of the past 12 years, propping each other up like two exhausted boxers after eight rounds. Before that, the centrist Free Democrats would generally decide which of the two larger parties to support in office, often shifting their allegiance halfway through a parliament.

Supporters of that arrangement call it “consensual” and “moderate” and “secure”. Again, though, these are all synonyms for “more of the same”.

Effective government requires an opposition. Ministers need to see an alternative government when they scan the parliamentary chamber. They should constantly be saying to themselves: “Whatever powers I award myself today will be in the hands of those idiots tomorrow.” It’s the single most effective constraint on state aggrandisement.

Several Western European countries have had German-style traditions of permanent coalition. In some of them, favoured parties were more or less permanently in office. These became known as the “cartel democracies”, because the ruling parties used legal and financial barriers to prevent newcomers from breaking through. Austria, Belgium and Italy were textbook cartel democracies for most of the post-war era.

Great Britain, of course, has a different tradition. Our winner-takes-all electoral method makes it far easier for voters to turn the rascals out. I say “Great Britain” rather than “the United Kingdom” because Northern Ireland embraced cartel democracy in 1998. The Belfast Agreement more or less obliges the big parties to be in a permanent coalition, and allows little role for opposition.

You can always spot the symptoms. The public sector grows as the various coalition partners scrabble to find sinecures for their supporters. In Austria during the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat duopoly, every position, from the headmaster of a village school to the director of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, might be allocated according to party membership card. These membership cards, by the way, were actual physical things: the Italian versions, beribboned and bemedalled, were especially magnificent, signifying, as they did, a precious IOU.

Cartel politicians, being unchallenged, could award themselves handsome perks, such as legal immunities and high salaries. When I was first elected to the European Parliament, MEPs were paid at the same rate as a national parliamentarian in their home country. The Austrians, Italians and Germans earned twice as much as anyone else. The cartel parties were quite flagrant in their attempts to stop newcomers from posing a challenge. In Belgium, for example, restrictions on private donations made parties dependent on state funding – which was then withdrawn from the Flemish separatists following a parliamentary vote by their rivals.

Secure in office, the old parties were able to ignore public demands for tax cuts, immigration controls, powers back from Brussels or anything else they could fastidiously dismiss as “populist”. Because leaders from a previous generation generally decided who could stand on their party lists, politics remained stuck in a Fifties corporatist consensus.

Only in the Nineties did the system start to break down. Fed up with the complacency and sleaze of their semi-permanent rulers, voters began to grope around for battering rams to smash open the old system. In Italy, they found a Trumpian avant la lettre – Silvio Berlusconi, who made a point of issuing no party membership cards. In Austria, they turned to Jörg Haider’s anti-immigration Freedom Party. In Belgium, they elected the Flemish nationalists. Only in Germany has the old partitocracy remained intact – at least until now.

Last year, Germany’s Christian Democrats suffered their worst result since 1949. The Social Democrats suffered their worst result since 1933. How will it look if the two losers get together to form a government based on all the things that had characterised the old racket – more immigration, deeper European integration, little economic reform, and the dismissal of all opposition as unconscionable populism?

I write in no carping spirit. I’m a paid-up Teutophile who wants Germany to succeed. Until the 20th century, Germans were our obvious allies, there being no possible rivalry between the world’s chief maritime continental powers. One 19th-century Austrian diplomat called it “the stability of the elephant and the whale”. Yet, tellingly, simply to mention that old friendship is regarded as ill-bred, if not downright offensive, by modern German politicians, who have been brought up to regard any mention of national interest as uncouth.

The post-war consensus is ill-suited to an age of rapid demographic and technological change. Automation and AI are making old notions of collective bargaining, class politics and top-down supranational blocs untenable. The incantations muttered by German politicians since 1945 – “social market”, “building Europe”, “all-party consensus” – are losing their force.

The charm worked when these things could be presented as the only alternative to war, but it is wearing off. The question is whether the old parties will adapt or be swept away, still clenched in their embrace. Stability is the last thing Germany needs.