Comment on the General Elections in the UK

These days I think back a lot to my stay in Leicester, a middle-sized town in the English East-Midlands, right around the corner of Nottingham and Robin Hood's famous Sherwood Forest. I stayed there in 2005/2006 for an Erasmus term. The elections for the German Bundestag took place just a couple of days before I caught my coach to England.

I vividly remember how many other Erasmus students and especially my English co-students in the different seminars asked us Germans what was going on in Germany and how it could be possible that the politicians were not able to form a government for weeks.
The social democrat chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, had triggered a snap election after losing a couple of important regions to the conservatives. Surprisingly the conservatives did not manage to achieve a clear victory despite the low popularity of the SPD government.

Chancellor Schroeder's appearance on election day has become famous for his psyched behaviour bordering on straight arrogance and many people were wondering if he was actually intoxicated. Long story short: Schroeder refused to step down to make a grand coalition under a chancellor Merkel possible and a political deadlock froze the Federal Republic for many weeks until Schroeder finally gave up and a CDU/SPD coalition could start its work.

In Leicester, we were talking a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of the British style first-past-the-post system and the German system of proportional representation at that time. Most people (including myself) considered it an advantage of the first-past-the-post system, that there was a very low danger of a hung parliament or a blockade like in Germany in 2005.

The General Elections in the UK on May 6th have now proven that this is not necessarily true. The majority of the British citizens are tired of Labour (at least according to 90% of all newspaper articles that I have read on the topic). But their voters are a more coherent group and have a higher regional concentration than those of the Tories or the LibDems, which means that with first-past-the-post even a hugely unpopular government has a chance to cling to power. Even though Labour is the main loser of the general elections, it is not clear yet if Tories and LibDems will be able to get to a coalition agreement, especially since David Cameron apparently does not even want to talk about the LibDems' main demand of reforming the electoral system of the UK.

Regardless of the outcome, the UK case illustrates a worrisome tendency: Not even a first-past-the-post system can apparently stop the decay of the large catch-all parties in Europe. In France, the political left is in hopeless disarray, much the same can be said for Italy. The big German parties are increasingly dependent on three-party coalitions in order to form a government in the German Länder, a trend that seems to be reinforced by the results of the elections in North Rhine-Westfalia today. Of course the LibDems benefited from the youthful charisma of their leader Nick Clegg and the frustration after the long Labour years. The only safe thing to say is that the negotiations about who will take power for the next couple of years in the UK will be interesting to watch. If the Tories fail to win the LibDems over, we could even witness Gordon Brown's comeback. The effects of this historical result on the first-past-the-post system is the second big question mark that will be answered within the next few days.