The rise of Reform could make Britain ungovernable – look to Germany to see why
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When the Tories returned to power in 2010, they promised to fix “Broken Britain”. Fourteen years later, it’s fair to say they haven’t. In fact, ‘broken’ is now the first word that springs to mind when people think of the UK, according to a recent survey by More in Common.
But how to fix the country? As a German living in the UK, I often get told by British friends: “if we had a multi-party system like they do in Europe, we’d have more choice.” My answer is always the same: be careful what you wish for.
Despite Britain’s system favouring the two main parties, many people are now looking beyond the political mainstream. On the Right, Reform UK is getting record polling numbers, registering up to 14 per cent of the vote. Former Tory MP Lee Anderson, who has joined the party, hopes it will do well because he thinks Labour and the Conservatives have ‘little between them.’
On the Left, the socialist and anti-Israel firebrand George Galloway managed to win one of the ugliest by-election campaigns in living memory in Rochdale, causing many to wonder if his Workers Party of Britain is becoming a political force. Galloway boasted he would give both Labour and the Conservatives a “good kicking”, claiming to speak for people who “feel a wish for a plague on both their houses”.
But a look at the country of my birth suggests that new political parties don’t fix our democracies – on the contrary. In Germany both mainstream parties have lost voters since the early 2000s. The reassuring explanation was that modern democracies demand more choice. Only it wasn’t trust in democracy that splintered the political spectrum but disillusionment with it.
We’re now in a position where the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is polling as the second largest political party while a new far-Left party, headed by the former communist Sahra Wagenknecht, is also projected to take up seats in the next German parliament. Germany makes for a troubling case study in what happens when the mainstream fails voters so badly that they run off in different directions in search of change and new ideas.
West Germany’s set-up after the Second World War was deliberately designed to avoid fractured politics. The Weimar Republic, the fledgling democracy established after the First World War, had failed in part due to the impossibility of establishing working coalitions between up to four parties. Socialists, Catholics, liberals and conservatives had attempted and failed to collaborate to steer the country out of trouble until the idea of a strongman began to appeal; Adolf Hitler filled the void of leadership.
After the war, West Germany came up with a complicated voting system that mixes first-past-the-post with proportional representation. For a long time this worked.
The conservative Christian Democrats, to whom chancellors such as Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel belonged, received over 40 per cent of the vote in every single election between 1954 and 1994. The Social Democrats (SPD) hovered between 30 and 45 per cent under charismatic chancellors like Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt.
Up until now such broad consensus created a fairly stable two-party coalitions where the smaller party added a bit of flavour and enough seats to gain a majority in parliament.
By contrast, the current ruling coalition is the first three-way one. And it lacks a dominant party. Having only gained a quarter of the vote, Olaf Scholz’s SPD was forced to negotiate a compromise with the liberal Free Democrats and the Greens. This pulled the government further to the Left than Scholz had suggested when he ran as the Merkel-in-Trousers candidate.
Now, polls suggest, the coalition would barely gain a third of the vote combined. The conservatives are unable to benefit much from the disaffection. At 30 per cent, they are currently polling as the strongest party but a far cry from results they had under Kohl and previous chancellors.
The fact that voters are increasingly unwilling to switch from one mainstream party to the other has allowed the fringes to capture and channel people’s despair. This trend is not a natural form of democratic evolution but a sign that mainstream parties no longer reflect large sections of the population.
First and foremost on the list of problems is credibility. As in Germany, people in the UK have lost trust in politics.
Politicians are now the least trusted profession in Britain, according to Ipsos polling. Two thirds of people say that the traditional parties don’t care about people like them.
UK voter turn-out paints a similar picture. Between the 1920s and the 1990s it was unfailingly above 70 per cent. In 2001 it dropped by over 10 per cent, recovering a bit since but never to previous levels.
More parties won’t restore trust in politics. Broken Britain won’t get fixed through more shouting from the back of multiple campaign busses. Like Germany, the UK doesn’t need more parties but better politics.
Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 is out in paperback
