Coalition government is not new in Europe — Germany has governed in coalition for most of its postwar history, the Benelux countries have long traditions of multiparty governance, and Nordic countries have alternated between minority and majority coalition arrangements for decades. What is new is the fragmentation of the party systems that make coalition formation increasingly difficult, slow and unstable. Across Europe, the number of parties needed to form a working majority has grown, the ideological distances between potential coalition partners have widened, and the average duration of coalition negotiations has extended. The consequences for governance — for speed of decision-making, policy coherence, and the experience of voters who choose one party and get something else — are becoming increasingly apparent.
The postwar baseline: stable two-and-a-half party systems
Most Western European democracies from the 1950s through the 1980s operated with relatively stable patterns of party competition: a dominant centre-left party, a dominant centre-right party, and one or two smaller parties that served as coalition kingmakers. West Germany’s SPD-CDU/CSU competition, with the FDP as the perennial junior partner, was the archetype. These systems generated governments within days or weeks of elections and produced coalitions with clear internal majorities and coherent policy programmes.
1990s–2010: Fragmentation begins
The fragmentation of European party systems began accelerating in the 1990s, driven by new parties on the green left, new right-wing populist parties, and the break-up of traditional class alignments as post-industrial economies reduced the size and cohesion of the manual working class that anchored centre-left parties. The Netherlands, historically one of the most fragmented party systems in Europe, saw its effective number of parties rise from around 5 in 1990 to over 8 by 2010. Other countries followed similar trajectories.
2015–2022: The fragmentation shock
The migration crisis of 2015 and the subsequent rise of far-right parties across Europe added a new dimension to coalition arithmetic: the cordon sanitaire. When far-right parties entered parliaments in large numbers, mainstream parties typically refused to govern with them — reducing the coalition options available and making majority formation more complex. In Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, formation processes extended to months, and in Belgium’s case, to over a year. As examined in our far-right rise analysis, the strategic choice of whether to maintain the cordon sanitaire or seek situational cooperation has become one of the defining tensions in European mainstream politics.
2022–2026: Coalition instability as a structural condition
The current period has seen several high-profile coalition failures and prolonged formation processes. Germany’s three-party “traffic light” coalition — SPD, FDP and Greens — collapsed in November 2024 after two years of internal conflict that significantly limited its policy effectiveness. The Netherlands formed four different governments between 2021 and 2026. France’s effectively hung parliament, as analysed in our French political crossroads piece, represents an extreme but not unique case of parliamentary deadlock.
For voters, the experience is disorienting. You vote for a party with a specific programme; that party enters a coalition that requires compromises that eliminate or dilute many of its signature commitments; the government that results differs substantially from what any individual voter chose. Research by political scientists consistently finds that this dynamic reduces voter satisfaction with democracy — not because voters oppose coalition government in principle, but because the translation between electoral choice and governmental outcome has become too opaque and too unpredictable.
