Electoral reform will not transform our political culture overnight, but refusing to confront fragmentation will make effective governance permanently impossible.
By Tom Brake, Director of Unlock Democracy
If you want to see what happens when politics gets stuck in the past, look no further than France. The country’s descent into near-ungovernability – a fractured parliament, fragile coalitions, and fiscal paralysis – is not simply the product of President Emmanuel Macron’s missteps or public discontent over the cost of living or changes to the retirement age. It is the consequence of a deeper structural mismatch: a fragmented party system straining against a voting system built for a bygone age. Sound familiar?
For decades, France’s majoritarian voting system masked the incessant rebrands of its parties. Politics reliably split into two broad camps on the centre-left and centre-right, which between 1958 and 2017 won an average of 78% of National Assembly seats, ensuring a predictable alternation of power.
But that logic has collapsed. Macron’s ‘En Marche’ exploded the traditional duopoly in 2017. The left has fractured into competing ideological families; the right splintered between more moderate forces and Marine Le Pen’s nationalist movement. Today, no bloc commands more than a third of the seats, and the “Republican front” – the informal alliance to keep the far right out of power – has completely broken down.
The result is chaos. Last week, Sébastien Lecornu was reappointed prime minister having resigned just days before – making him France’s fifth or sixth prime minister in two years, depending on how you count it. The National Assembly, meanwhile, seems no closer to passing a budget. Admittedly, France’s fiscal outlook would test even the most united of parliaments: persistent budget deficits, mountainous public debt, and retirement reform a festering sore. But that’s no excuse. The job of politicians is to take the tough decisions. Yet rather than grapple with the trade-offs, and reach for consensus, a majority of the National Assembly prefer to play political chicken. Markets have noticed: French borrowing costs have widened compared to Germany’s to overtake the eurozone average, reflecting doubts about whether any government can control the deficit.
The problem is not simply one of personality or leadership but of institutional design. The system that once disciplined political forces now amplifies their fragmentation. Staging elections over two rounds – first a vote of conviction (to establish the most popular candidates), then one of calculation (to determine a single winner who for many voters will be the least worst candidate) – was thought to encourage convergence; today, it exposes disunity. When ideological cleavages multiply, tactical alliances in the second round become incoherent or impossible, yielding patchwork parliaments and brittle coalitions.
Where most other European countries are used to navigating balanced parliaments, modern French politics, its reflexes and incentive structures – majoritarian, like our own – militate against consensus. Britain should take heed. The conditions that have pushed France to the brink are already present on this side of the Channel. The Liberal Democrats, Greens, Reform UK, and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales are all chipping away at the once-dominant Conservative-Labour duopoly. Meanwhile, the social and geographic divides that define British politics – young versus old, cities versus towns, London versus the rest – increasingly cut across party lines.
The next general election could easily deliver a hung parliament, or, like the last, a government with a sandcastle majority. If that happens, the Westminster model will face the same test France is now failing: can a winner-takes-all system cope with an electorate that no longer thinks in binary terms? Britain’s institutions, like France’s, still assume that political competition will organise itself neatly around two broad governing parties. That assumption no longer holds.
France’s turmoil is not inevitable; it is the result of institutions and politicians failing to adapt to new political realities. (To be fair to Michel Barnier and François Bayrou, both recognised the problem as Prime Minister, and opened up the possibility of moving to a proportional voting system. Neither lasted long enough to see it through.)
Without reform, Britain risks the same fate: fiscal inertia, fragile legitimacy, and governments too weak to confront long-term problems. Electoral reform will not transform our political culture overnight, but refusing to confront fragmentation will make effective governance permanently impossible. The lesson from Paris is clear – when political systems no longer match the societies they serve, chaos follows. Britain can still act before it reaches that point. But time is running short.
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