An old Smothers Brothers album title came to mind when I saw the results of Sweden's election. Proportional representation has let its legislature with a result that Germany has seen quite a bit in recent history, a result that forces the mainstream parties to set up a grand coalition.
In Germany, it was the not-quite-reformed-enoough Communist "Left Party" that is persona-non-grata in coalitions. If neither the Social Democrat-Green coalition of the left or the Christian Democrat-Free Democrat coalition of the right could get to a majority, you got the SDU and the CDU working in an awkward "grand coalition" government.
In Sweden, we have the parties of the left getting 158 seats, the current right-of-center collation getting 142 votes and the nativist Sweden Democrats getting 49 seats. A feminist party just missed the 4% cutoff for getting votes, which might well have cost the left a working coalition.
"Far right" is the common application for the SD's, but their platform is mostly conservative on immigration and social issues rather than economics; that's true of France's National Front as well, where that nativist party is not all that conservative on economics, either. The SD have some Nazi-style types in their party history, but they've seemingly moderated in the last two decades, drawing votes from the mainstream conservative parties and coming in with 13% of the vote, good for third place.
Anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim immigrant, feelings seem to be driving the Sweden Democrats' vote. However, their goal of being "Kingmaker" assumes that the nobility of the other parties deign to work with them.
The leading parties of left and right, then Social Democrat and the Moderates respectively, could rule without any other help, having 197 seats, well over the 175 that would be a simple majority. Or, the left coalition could bring one of the smaller right-of-center parties on board to patch together a coalition.
This might be a wave of the future in countries with proportional representation; if nativist parties drawing energy from multicultural dysfunction make it impossible for a right-of-center coalition to be made without them, then these rudderless "grand coalitions" might be the norm.
Such nativist parties seem to be growing rather than shrinking. One news item of late gives us the odd sight of seeing French Jews supporting the National Front, seeing them as their best defense against French Muslims despite having some strong anti-Semitic vibes in their nativism. A somewhat less nativist and more economically conservative UK Independence Party did well in the last EU election, getting the most votes; they could well be the largest party in Parliament, especially if Scotland opts to leave the UK later this week.
Of the nativist parties in western Europe, only the Dutch Freedom Party has been allowed into a coalition government. If that exclusion continues, we might see more of these grand coalitions
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