Why is Europe so hard to govern?

Why is Europe so hard to govern?
The end of clear parliamentary majorities and the narrowness of election results is producing government gridlock in large tracts of Europe.

Ian Traynor

October 2, 2006 04:51 PM

In Innsbruck on Sunday night Herwig Van Staa, the Christian democratic governor of the western province of Tyrol, let out a sigh and delivered an astute observation as the surprising results of Austria's general elections filtered in."Governing in Europe is getting harder and harder," he said.

His boss, Wolfgang Schuessel, evicted from power after a moderately successful six years leading the Austrian government, would certainly agree. So, too, would Angela Merkel in Berlin whose unwieldy "grand coalition" of Christian and social democrats appears to be running out of steam after only a year in office.

A couple of hours to the east, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Warsaw, prime minister of Poland a mere three months, has just lost his parliamentary majority, is scratching around for a new partner and may have to call new elections later this month. To his south-west in Prague, Miroslav Topolanek goes before parliament this week to try to get backing for his centre-right coalition. The Czech Republic has been without a proper government since a dead-heat election in June. Mr Topolanek's days in power look over before he even got started.

And as Vienna contemplates a return to grand coalition government of the kind that has dominated the post-war era in Austria, its old imperial twin, Budapest, is in the throes of an extra-parliamentary attempt to bring down the centre-left government of Ferenc Gyurcsany. Unlike everywhere else in central Europe, the Hungarian has a comfortable parliamentary majority - for the time being at least - but on Sunday his socialists took a pounding in local elections, losing control of most of the towns and cities of Hungary with the notable exception of Budapest itself where the liberal (non-socialist) mayor, Gabor Demszky, retained the office he has held all through the modern democratic era since 1990.

The election in Austria on Sunday highlights the predicament pointed out by Van Staa, a problem that is engulfing large tracts of Europe and producing government gridlock - the end of clear parliamentary majorities and the narrowness of the election results.

In Prague, putative government and opposition are split evenly in the 200-seat chamber, making it nigh impossible to legislate. In Italy in April, Romano Prodi pipped Silvio Berlusconi by a mere tenth of a percentage point or less than 25,000 votes in a country of 60 million. In Germany a year ago, Mrs Merkel's Christian democrats beat Gerhard Schroeder's social democrats by less than a percentage point, 35.2 to 34.3, a similar result to Austria on Sunday where the surprise victors, the social democrats under Alfred Gusenbauer beat Mr Schuessel's OeVP Christian democrats by 1.5 percentage points, 35.7 to 34.2.

The pattern emerging here across Europe is of the two big parties of the centre-left and centre-right increasingly taking less of the national vote, just over one third each, while the remaining 30 per cent of the vote goes to fringe parties - free market liberals, Greens, and the extreme right who roughly take 10 per cent each, making it arithmetically impossible for either of the big parties to form a coalition with one of the 10 per cent parties.

Austrians, craving consensus, like "grand coalitions" - they have had more than 30 years of them since the war. They run relatively smoothly. But they smother democracy through their whopping majorities and ineffective opposition, promote backroom deals and corruption, and encourage extremists. It was the decades of cosy big coalitions that contributed hugely to the rise of Joerg Haider, Europe's most successful extreme right vote-getter, now reduced as of Sunday to a regional politician in Austria. Germany, by contrast, does not like grand coalitions because of the fear of encouraging extremism to the left and right. The Merkel government is only the second such experiment in the history of the federal republic.

But the messy arithmetic of coalition-forming in central Europe and beyond, the increasing volatility of the voter (up to one third of Austrians polled said they did not know how they were going to vote), the declining participation in elections (74 per cent in Austria on Sunday - high by British or American standards, but 10 per cent down on the last election in 2002 and the first time the turnout has dropped below 80 per cent) are all making stable government a more difficult and risky adventure.