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European Democracy Is Broken. Here's How to Fix It.By Bloomberg

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- What do Spain, Israel, Austria, Belgium and the German state of Thuringia and perhaps, soon, the U.K., have in common? Elections whose outcomes make reasonable, cohesive parliamentary governing coalitions next to impossible. This isn’t just political fragmentation, which is becoming the norm in Europe and beyond. It’s compromise-defying deadlock. Breaking it may require substantial change to political traditions and parliamentary procedures.

Spain has just held the fourth inconclusive election in as many years and the second this year. The problem for the plurality winner, caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, is that he’s already tried and failed to make deals with political parties on the leftist flank and in the political center. Policy differences with the remaining parties would probably paralyze a coalition government that included them. Such a scenario is unfolding in Germany now under a reluctant, uneasy coalition of the center-right and the center-left.

In Austria, where the election took place on Sept. 29, more than a month of indecision ensued because the plurality winner, center-right leader Sebastian Kurz, had no willing coalition partners except on the far-right. Kurz had already tried governing in that combination and failed at it. On Monday, the Greens announced they’d talk to Kurz, and he launched negotiations with them despite what now appear to be irreconcilable differences on climate-change policies and migration. The talks probably will last well into next year.

It’s impossible to predict how long Belgium will go without a government after the May election. Negotiators appointed by the king to explore coalition possibilities resigned last week without getting anywhere because the strongest parties — the Flemish nationalists and the Francophone socialists — have no discernible common interests.

In Thuringia, there’s no majority coalition in sight following the state’s October election. The far left, led by incumbent Minister-President Bodo Ramelow, won a plurality, but parties that agree to work with his political force don’t have a combined majority. Nor can his opponents work together without breaking clear promises to their voters.

Unless Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in the U.K. can win an outright majority next month, the country will find itself in a similar situation, with any workable coalition difficult to imagine on ideological grounds.

In all these places, caretaker cabinets without full parliamentary support are perfectly capable of running the nations’ day-to-day business, keeping government offices open and public employees paid. But politics are as fragmented as they are today because many voters want change, and that’s not possible without powerful governments pushing it. Meanwhile, it’s getting harder to overcome ideological differences simply for the sake of stability and responsibility, since voters tend to dismiss such attempts as self-seeking and ineffective.

At least in Israel, which has held two inconclusive elections this year, the biggest parties are willing to try something new to break the deadlock, like a prime ministerial rotation with the current leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, remaining in office for a year and then handing things over to his rival and possible coalition partner Benny Gantz. The Europeans should get more creative, too. Government formation talks are getting more protracted everywhere and junior coalition partners are getting harder to recruit because of mounting statistical evidence that playing the role usually leads to dramatic election losses.

Leader rotations are an ingenious solution, but they hardly spell stability. It might be less damaging to move toward the minority government-friendly Scandinavian model. In Norway, appointing a prime minister doesn’t require a confirmation vote by the majority of parliament as in Spain or Germany. The ruling party is usually just the plurality winner in the election, while smaller parties often display a coalition aversion: They can achieve more in opposition, helping form ad-hoc majorities only on measures they can support instead of working inside governments. In Sweden, there is a confirmatory vote, but only to make sure an absolute majority of the parliament doesn’t oppose a new prime minister. In other words, legislators are only required to tolerate rather than actively support a government.

A minority-government tradition hands a lot of power to plurality winners in elections, but at the same time, they must work more actively with the opposition than parties ruling in majority coalitions. The advantage is that all the parties can maintain their political identities and only make compromises that they can accept sincerely.

Decision-making without stable majorities could be even more efficient with broader use of ranked-choice voting, in which legislators could rank various versions of a bill in order of preference to break deadlocks like the Brexit stalemate that afflicts the U.K. Parliament. The power of this procedure would allow a minority government to push through important legislation, but it wouldn’t completely eliminate the need for compromises. Part of the opposition, no matter how fragmented, could unite against competing measures and assemble a bigger plurality than the government’s.

Breaking with political traditions and reforming voting rules is hard: Political systems are stabilized by inertia. But politicians should be able to see that democracy works differently now than it did in previous decades. Unless they make changes today, while responsible, traditional parties are still winning pluralities, voter disappointment with ineffective, constantly bickering governments or months-long cabinet formation processes can lead to outright victories by so-called anti-elite forces, often on the far right. Then, it’ll be too late for reasonable forces to unite against them.

To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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