There runs a common European thread through the long political stalemate in Spain and the persisting turmoil in Greece — happily, it has just wound its course in Ireland. It is that, despite the plummeting popular trust in mainstream parties as a fallout of the financial crisis, there seems to be discernible pragmatism within the established order. Driving home this message most recently was Dublin, where the two main parties have bridged their century-old political divide to end the long deadlock that followed an inconclusive election in February. Under the deal sealed on Friday, the centre-right Fine Gael will form a minority government with the support of arch-rival Fianna Fáil. The political impasse in Spain, which in June will go to the polls for the second time in six months, is not very dissimilar. To be sure, the verdict last December threw up the first-ever hung legislature since the country returned to democracy in the 1970s. Still, the continuing political impasse may not mask the fact that the country’s biggest players, the conservative People’s Party and the Socialists, together took well over 50 per cent of the vote and a sizeable number of seats to command a majority. The quest for stability could well influence voters in the June elections to turn away from smaller parties which they perceive as having limited electoral prospects.
In Greece, the electorate handed the radical left Syriza party a renewed mandate last September. That decisive verdict was, embarrassingly enough for everybody in Greece, an endorsement of the European Union’s economic bailout, one that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras embraced just days after it had been roundly rejected in a popular referendum. Should the sequence of events be read as confirmation that both the populace and their leaders feel they have a stake in the stability of the system? The current scenario in Spain and Ireland is made up of three distinct elements. The first is the erosion of the absolute dominance of the leading parties. The second is the inevitability of cohabitation in a common government between them. The third is the near numerical inadequacy, or ideological incompatibility sometimes, of cobbling together a coalition with smaller parties. Germany’s incumbent grand coalition of traditional rivals, the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party, fits into the second scenario. Berlin has had the arrangement twice over the last decade, besides an earlier experiment in the 1960s. The recent Europe-wide rise of parties on the political extreme, if anything, lends greater relevance for the German political model as a suitable strategy, even beyond Berlin, to counter a common threat. Conversely, a constructive response to a fragmented polity presumes that the core of the centre is not allowed to erode in the face of populism. That seems a difficult prospect in electoral democracies, as borne out by the hollowing out of the middle ground in recent years in country after country the world over.
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