The Fragile Bargain: Why Coalition Politics So Often Produces Unstable Governments
In December 2024, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag, triggering snap elections in February 2025 and bringing an abrupt end to one of the most dysfunctional governing coalitions in modern German history. The so-called “traffic light” coalition, a three-party arrangement between the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, had collapsed in November 2024 after barely three years, undone by irreconcilable differences over debt limits, climate spending, and economic policy. For millions of German voters, the spectacle was disheartening but not surprising. They had seen it before.
Coalition politics is the normal condition of governance across much of the democratic world. In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Israel, Italy, and dozens of other countries that use proportional representation, no single party typically wins enough seats to govern alone. Parties must negotiate, compromise, and form alliances just to take office. In theory, this sounds like democracy working exactly as intended: multiple voices, shared power, consensus-building. In practice, it frequently produces something else entirely: fragile agreements that unravel under pressure, governments paralyzed by internal vetoes, and electoral systems that can leave countries without effective leadership for months at a time.
The question worth asking in 2026, as political fragmentation accelerates across Europe and beyond, is not whether coalition government is good or bad. It is why it so reliably generates instability, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
The Mathematics of Fragmentation
To understand coalition instability, you have to start with the electoral systems that make coalitions necessary in the first place. Proportional representation, or PR, allocates parliamentary seats roughly in proportion to each party’s share of the popular vote. A party that wins 15 percent of the vote gets approximately 15 percent of the seats. The appeal is obvious: PR systems tend to produce legislatures that look like the electorate, with smaller parties and minority communities receiving meaningful representation.
But PR systems have a structural vulnerability. Because seats are distributed broadly, they reward fragmentation. Niche parties, regional parties, single-issue movements, and ideological splinter groups can all win seats that would be impossible to obtain in a first-past-the-post system like the one used in the United States or the United Kingdom. The more parties enter parliament, the harder it becomes for any single party to command a majority. And without a majority, governing requires coalition.
Germany’s Bundestag, long seen as one of the more stable examples of coalition governance, illustrated this problem vividly in the 2021 federal election, which produced a Bundestag with six party groupings (counting the CDU and CSU as one). Forming a government required negotiations among three of those parties, producing the 177-page coalition agreement that ultimately governed (and constrained) the Scholz administration. The sheer length and specificity of such agreements can be read as a sign of limited trust: each party is trying to lock the others into commitments in writing.
The problem has intensified as European party systems have fragmented further. In Italy, the number of parties winning parliamentary representation has expanded dramatically since the early 1990s, when the collapse of the old Christian Democrat and Socialist establishments created an opening for new entrants. In the Netherlands, the lower house of parliament currently hosts representatives from more than a dozen parties, a level of fragmentation that made forming a government after the 2023 elections a months-long ordeal. In Israel, no party has won an outright majority in the Knesset since the state’s founding, producing a decades-long string of coalition governments with varying degrees of dysfunction.
Why Coalition Agreements Break Down
Even when parties successfully negotiate a coalition agreement, the arrangement remains inherently unstable. The reasons are structural, psychological, and political, and they tend to reinforce each other.
The first problem is incentive divergence. Each party in a coalition was elected on a distinct platform, with a distinct voter base that expects distinct results. When governing requires compromise, each party must explain to its supporters why it failed to deliver on certain promises. The standard answer, “we had to make concessions to our partners,” satisfies no one for long. Over time, junior coalition partners in particular face what political scientists call the “coalition penalty”: the tendency for smaller parties in governing arrangements to lose support at subsequent elections, precisely because they are seen as having subordinated their principles to the demands of governance.
Germany’s Free Democrats experienced this dynamic brutally. After entering the 2021 coalition as a junior partner with roughly 11.5 percent of the vote, the party hemorrhaged support as voters felt it had either compromised too much or not enough, depending on whom you asked. By the time the coalition collapsed in late 2024, FDP polling had fallen near or below the 5 percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag at all.
The second structural problem is the veto player dynamic. In a coalition government, each party effectively holds a veto over major policy decisions. Any proposal that one partner finds unacceptable can be blocked, regardless of its merits or popular support. This creates what political scientist George Tsebelis called a “veto player” problem: the more veto players exist in a system, the harder it becomes to change the policy status quo, even when change is urgently needed. Coalition governments with three or more parties are particularly prone to this form of paralysis.
The third problem is timing. Coalition agreements are negotiated at a single moment, based on the political circumstances and economic forecasts of that moment. Governments must then govern across years that may bring unforeseen crises, economic shocks, or shifts in public opinion. When reality diverges from the assumptions embedded in the coalition agreement, the document becomes a straitjacket. Partners who agreed in principle on, say, climate investment may violently disagree about whether that investment should be financed through new debt or spending cuts, a dispute that played a central role in the collapse of Germany’s traffic light coalition.
Belgium and Italy: Case Studies in Chronic Instability
If Germany offers a cautionary tale about coalition fragility, Belgium and Italy offer something closer to cautionary epics.
Belgium is known for the longest government formation of any modern democracy: 541 days between 2010 and 2011, during which a caretaker executive handled routine business. A similar stretch came between 2019 and 2020, when it took nearly 500 days after the election to swear in a government. The country’s linguistic and regional divisions, between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, map onto its party system in ways that make coalition-building extraordinarily complex. Flemish parties refuse to govern with certain Walloon parties, ideological differences cut across linguistic lines, and any viable federal coalition typically requires assembling five or more parties. The result is not merely slow governance but a system in which technocratic caretaker governments handle routine business while elected politicians negotiate endlessly.
Italy presents a different but equally instructive pattern. Since 1946, Italy has had more than 65 governments, an average of roughly one government per year. While the Italian Republic has frequently been described as institutionally stable despite its governmental churn, that defense has grown harder to sustain as the country’s economic performance has lagged behind European peers for decades. Coalition instability has made it nearly impossible to implement long-term structural reforms, since any coalition partner can bring down a government rather than accept policies it dislikes. The arrival of Giorgia Meloni’s government in 2022, itself a coalition between three right-wing parties, was greeted partly as a relief: at least there was a clear majority. But the historical pattern suggests that Italy’s coalition mathematics will eventually reassert themselves.
The Counterargument: Coalition Government as Democratic Virtue
Not everyone views coalition politics as a problem. There is a serious, well-developed case for coalition government, and it deserves engagement rather than dismissal.
The most compelling argument is representational. First-past-the-post systems like the British Westminster model routinely produce governments with large parliamentary majorities based on a minority of the popular vote. In the 2019 UK general election, the Conservative Party won a commanding 80-seat majority on 43.6 percent of the vote. Critics argue that this kind of manufactured majority is its own form of democratic distortion: it gives a party governing power far exceeding its actual support and insulates it from the need to compromise. Coalition government, by contrast, requires that multiple parties with multiple constituencies agree before policies are enacted. Decisions made this way may be slower and messier, but they arguably reflect a broader social consensus.
Political scientist Arend Lijphart developed this argument into a full theoretical framework in his work on “consensus democracy.” Lijphart distinguished between “majoritarian” systems, which concentrate power and produce strong but potentially exclusionary governments, and “consensus” systems, which distribute power and produce inclusive but sometimes slow governance. His empirical analysis suggested that consensus democracies tend to produce better outcomes on measures like voter turnout, income equality, and environmental policy, though these findings have been contested.
The Nordic countries are frequently cited as evidence that coalition governance can work well. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have all maintained coalition or minority governments for much of their postwar histories while also delivering high-quality public services, strong economic performance, and high levels of civic trust. The key difference, analysts suggest, is a political culture of genuine compromise and strong institutional norms that constrain individual parties from behaving destructively. Germany itself governed effectively under coalition arrangements for most of the postwar period, with the long-running CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalitions providing relative stability.
The problem, in other words, may not be coalition politics per se but coalition politics under conditions of extreme fragmentation, ideological polarization, or weak institutional norms. When parties enter coalitions in good faith and share enough common ground to govern, the system can work. When they do not, the results are predictably dire.
The Structural Fixes That Work Imperfectly
Recognizing the instability problem, many countries have experimented with institutional mechanisms designed to make coalitions more durable.
Germany’s “constructive vote of no confidence” is one of the most studied examples. Under this rule, the Bundestag cannot simply vote to remove a chancellor; it must simultaneously elect a replacement. The logic is that parties willing to tear down a government must be willing and able to build an alternative one. This provision, introduced in the 1949 Basic Law as a reaction to the parliamentary chaos of the Weimar Republic, has contributed to Germany’s relatively low rate of government turnover compared to Italy or Israel. But as the 2024 collapse demonstrated, it cannot prevent a coalition from disintegrating when the partners simply choose to walk away.
Electoral thresholds are another common tool. Germany requires parties to win at least 5 percent of the national vote (or three direct constituency seats) before entering the Bundestag. The explicit purpose is to prevent the legislature from filling up with tiny parties unable to participate meaningfully in coalition formation. Similar thresholds exist in Sweden (4 percent), the Netherlands (just under 0.7 percent, making it nearly toothless), and Turkey (a 7 percent threshold, lowered from 10 percent in 2022, that remains among the highest in Europe and has been widely criticized as anti-democratic). The German threshold has helped keep the number of Bundestag parties manageable by historical standards, but it has not prevented the fragmentation visible in recent elections.
Some political scientists have proposed formalized coalition negotiation frameworks, time limits on coalition talks, or constitutional requirements for early election triggers when governments fail. The Israeli political system’s dysfunction has generated numerous such proposals, including reforms to the electoral threshold and changes to the government formation process. In practice, the parties that would need to pass such reforms are also the parties most advantaged by the existing system, creating an obvious collective action problem.
Fragmentation, Polarization, and the Road Ahead
As 2026 progresses, the structural pressures on coalition politics show no sign of easing. Several trends are making coalition formation harder, not easier.
The rise of anti-establishment parties across Europe, from the Alternative for Germany on the far right to various left-populist movements, has created what political scientists call “coalition exclusion” dilemmas. At the federal level, mainstream parties in Germany have maintained a “firewall,” now under growing strain, that excludes the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) from governing coalitions despite its strong electoral performance. This is democratically defensible given the AfD’s controversial positions, but it has the structural effect of shrinking the pool of viable coalition partners for mainstream parties, forcing them into awkward combinations or minority governments.
At the same time, ideological polarization within the remaining mainstream parties makes compromise harder. The disagreements that tore apart Germany’s traffic light coalition were not merely technical disputes about budget accounting. They reflected deep, genuine differences about the role of the state, the pace of the energy transition, and the appropriate response to economic slowdown. These are not differences easily papered over by careful drafting of coalition agreements.
The experience of the past several years suggests that proportional representation systems will need to grapple seriously with whether their institutional designs remain adequate to the political conditions they now face. The classic defense of coalition government, that it produces consensual, broadly representative outcomes, depends on conditions of moderate fragmentation and reasonable good faith among coalition partners. Where those conditions no longer hold, the system’s vulnerabilities become its defining features.
This does not mean that proportional representation or coalition politics should be abandoned. The alternatives have their own serious pathologies. But it does mean that democracies relying on these systems must invest more seriously in the institutional guardrails, political cultures, and electoral designs that make coalition governance viable. Germany’s rocky decade of coalition politics, culminating in the 2024 collapse, is not just a German story. It is a preview of the challenges facing coalition democracies everywhere as their party systems grow more fragmented and their political cultures grow more adversarial. The bargain that makes coalition politics possible is becoming more fragile. Whether democratic institutions can adapt fast enough is one of the defining questions of this political moment.