More Political Parties Won't Solve Anything
Voters Are Unhappy With Their Choices Even When They're Many
Those who know me know that I’m an elections nerd and have been for 20 years now. How people vote fascinates me, I believe it’s a window into the culture of a community and its people. I am especially interested in international elections where there are multiple parties, which creates fascinating complex dynamics.
My passion has also given me an insight into how multiparty democracies function. One of the most common complaints about the American political system is that we only have two choices, the center-left Democratic Party and the, arguably, far-right Republican Party. Two choices in a nation of 330 million people leave many feeling disenfranchised. Calls for a third party, or more parties, are common.
Having followed elections in countries with multiple parties for years, however, hasn’t convinced me that voters in those countries necessarily feel more enfranchised. Especially in the past decade or so, voters in those countries are as unhappy with their five, 10, or 15 options as we are with our two.
This month, voters in the Netherlands went to the polls. A month out, it seemed like one of the center-right parties would win. At the time, the far-right PVV, whose leader Geert Wilders, a fan of former President Donald Trump who supports banning the Quran in the Netherlands and cutting off immigration from Muslim countries, was polling in fourth, unable to rise out of the 15-20 percent threshold they’ve been at for years.
Something happened in the month between then and when the Dutch voted on November 22. The PVV skyrocketed in the polls in the final month, and came in first in the election results, winning a plurality of seats and the opportunity to form a government. The result shocked political observers and is considered to be one of the biggest political upsets in post-World War II Europe. I’ll explore this election in a shorter piece this week.
The Netherlands has 15 political parties that won at least one seat in Parliament in last week’s election. Fifteen options for voters, as opposed to our two. Sounds great, right? Well, here’s the catch. For a government to form, a party needs to win 76 of the 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament. With 15 parties, it is impossible that anyone would win that many, so parties must form coalitions with each other to get to 76 seats.
Typically in this system, the party that wins the most voters is the primary coalition partner and that party’s leader serves as Prime Minister. Cabinet jobs are handed out to members of the smaller parties in private negotiations, the type of backroom deals Americans would no doubt consider to be schemey and corrupt. In the case of the Netherlands, if Wilders is unable to form a government, King Wilhem-Alexander (yes the Netherlands has a king, and a gay-friendly queen), will ask the second-place finisher to form one – that would be the left-wing GreenLeft-Labour. One would think that would be welcome news for the Dutch left.
Well no. If you took the sum of all the left-of-center parties out of the 15 who won seats, they would only add up to 46 seats, 30 fewer than needed to form a government. That means GreenLeft-Labour leader Frans Timmermans would have to negotiate with center and center-right parties to join his coalition, and that would mean he would have to give in on some key policy proposals those parties don’t support. It’s unlikely that would happen as the center-right parties and Wilders all dislike Timmermans and his party’s policies, especially on immigration. Imagine if Bernie Sanders needed Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley to gain a majority of seats. What would he have to give in on? What would you be willing to have him give in on?
If no government is formed, then Dutch voters go back to the polls and try again, and again and again until they elect a Parliament that can form a government. That happened in Greece in the early 2010s and in Israel between 2019 and 2022. In three years, Israeli voters had to cast ballots in five elections because the eight-to-13 political parties who won seats in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) were unable to hobble together the 61 votes needed to form a government, or if they did, hold onto it. In 2021, longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ousted by an opposition led by Yair Lipid who was able to gather the 61 votes needed to form a government. Still, to do so he had to negotiate with some of Israel’s far-right parties who had become critics of Netanyahu because Israeli voters elected a right-wing majority among the eight parties that won seats. One of those parties was a party called Yamina (literally meaning “rightward” in Hebrew). This party supported Israel’s annexation of much of the West Bank where controversial Jewish settlements have been established in the past few decades. Lapid, prioritizing domestic issues, notably Netanyahu’s proposal to shield him from criminal prosecution, had to submit to them to get the votes needed to become Prime Minister and was forced into a coalition government where he rotated the prime minister role with Yamina leader Naftali Bennett. After about a year in power, the coalition collapsed when one Yamina member left the coalition to join Netanyahu’s opposition. That led to new elections which Netanyahu won.
The political understory to the recent Dutch elections, and the recent Israeli ones, as well as recent multiparty elections in Spain, Argentina, and New Zealand, is that voters were generally unhappy with every one of their choices and because of that, the least unpopular option, often someone or some group who has never held office before or is seen as anti-establishment, wins. It was easy to write off Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 as “voters wanted more choices” but Trump-like figures are winning in countries where voters have a dozen or more options, and ultimately failing to change the dynamics.
In Italy, whose multiparty system has become notorious for unstable governments, voters were tired of the two main coalitions and the dozen or so parties that they were made up of, and in 2018 gave the Five Star Movement, a recently-created anti-establishment populist party, the most seats in Parliament. The new party immediately faceplanted and was unable to form a government, leading Guissepe Conte, a technocrat with little political experience, to step in and beg the main right-wing party to form a coalition with Five Star. They were soundly defeated in the next election.
In France, the main two parties, the Socialists and the UDR, became so unpopular, that voters began coalescing around the far-right National Front and the centrist En Marche, led by current President Emmanuel Macron. Today both those parties have low favorability ratings with the French public. In Canada, voters have wiped out both the two main political parties that have governed the country since the 19th Century, the Conservatives in 1993 and the Liberals in 2011. The parties that supplanted them were given some attention by voters before voters made the Liberals and the Tories the two major parties in the country again. Last year, during a snap election campaign in Denmark, where ten parties sit in Parliament, I followed a conversation between a longtime Danish friend and her relatives/friends on Facebook and found wide agreement in the conversation that none of the ten parties excited them. Many did not vote. As a result, the election saw the lowest turnout since 1994 and the incumbent prime minister, who had been brought down in a vote of no confidence over her handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic, held onto power.
Ultimately, multiparty democracies are also two-party systems: the government and the opposition. The difference is those two are made up of different political parties and not factions within one party, like in the U.S.
I would personally like to see the United States be a multiparty democracy. We would need to change our form of government to do that, but I think it would be more representative and engaging. I also don’t think it would solve our apathy problem. Multiparty systems often empower a select few, who can bring down entire governments on a whim, as what happened in Israel in 2022. We got a hint of this in Washington during the Speaker election in October. Can you imagine a situation where Matt Gaetz has the power to bring down the entire American government and force new elections over and over again? The Democratic Party’s uneasy alliance with Sens. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) is also a taste of what a multiparty system is like. Democrats had to give in on the child tax credit and Build Back Better, as well as throw in the towel on eliminating the filibuster, to get them on board with the rest of the agenda. A left-wing workers party would have to do the same in order to be in the government, or risk having centrists prop up a right-wing coalition. They would still have all the power.
The plus side of having this system is the far left and far right will be able to get a better idea of how large their influence is. What happens when the far left party wins 10-15 seats in Congress and the far right wins 50-75 seats? Or, must less likely, vice versa? That might wake up the radical fringes and show them that they don’t represent the majority and will have to either compromise on some of their ideas or do better with messaging. Now, however, both fringes believe they are the “base” of the two parties, even if they are not representative of the electorate at all, simply because they can turn out a few thousand protests or get a lot of likes on social media.
Progressives might feel better knowing that there’s a party they feel comfortable voting for, but what happens when they only win a handful of seats and can only have any power if they sit in a coalition with a bunch of moderates who would be just as comfortable creating a coalition government with center-right parties? Ultimately, multiparty democracies are also two-party systems: the government and the opposition. The difference is those two are made up of different political parties and not factions within one party, like in the U.S.
The main source of our political malaise is the dilution of political views in an electorate as large as America’s. More than 158 million people voted in the 2020 election. Only India has more people voting in national elections. When you’re one of 158 million people, it’s easy to feel as if you are not being represented. For every one of you, there are tens and perhaps hundreds of people who disagree and outvote you. In a nation as populated as ours, even being one of hundreds or thousands can make you a fringe minority. It’s cool that you got 100,000 people out to your protest, but Bernie Sanders got more votes than that in the 2020 South Carolina Democratic Primary, a race he lost in a landslide. Our frustration is not with the “system” or “establishment” or lack of choices, but with the fact that our destinies are in the hands of tens of millions of fellow Americans whom we’ve never met and whose own self-interest often conflicts with yours or mine.
Having more parties might make you feel as if you are being heard because more parties mean less competition for votes, but once elections are over governments need to be formed, and someone needs to get to 50 percent plus one, and that requires compromising with groups that hold different or conflicting ideas from yours. Disillusionment sets in, as has been the case in both here and in democracies where there are multiple parties.