Coalition Government: Not the Worst Thing That's Ever Happened

The following is probably a bit dry, and isn't especially to do with media coverage. But it is something that is so rarely addressed and badly, if ever, explained in mainstream media that I felt the need to write something just to get it out there. So my apologies.

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An obnoxious parallel between the Canadian election campaign and last year's UK election campaign: an enormous amount of uneducated gasping about how terrible a coalition government would be.

In both election campaigns, there was a Conservative party looking likely to win the most seats, but not enough for a majority government. In Canada, we are familiar with minority governments, having had 11 (or more, if you count a few unorthodox cases) since 1921, including the last three. The UK has only had five minority governments (or hung parliaments) since 1910, the last in 1974. In much of the rest of the world, hung parliaments are common election results; the party with the most seats is asked by the head of state to form a government, and they try to gain the tacit or explicit support of one or more smaller parties in order to form a majority government. If the party with the most seats can't make a deal with any other parties, then the leader of the official opposition - the party with the second most seats - is asked to form a government instead. This is normal parliamentary procedure.

In both cases, as I said, the Conservatives were/are expected to win the most seats, but not a majority. In theory, they could try to lead a minority government (which tend to last around a year on average and lead to early elections, and which have proved troublesome for Stephen Harper's Conservatives in Canada over the last two governments), or they could try to lead a coalition. In both cases, the pre-election rhetoric has instead been based on the idea that the Conservatives could not make a deal with the smaller parties (the Liberal Democrats in the UK and the NDP and Bloc Quebecois in Canada) because of the differences in platforms and their distance on the political spectrum. So the assumption was that the UK Labour Party and the Canadian Liberal Party would instead be able to form coalitions and become the government.

Again - this would be normal parliamentary procedure. If the party with the most seats isn't willing to compromise or concede enough to win the support of another party, it can't govern. It represents too few people. If the smaller parties can compromise to form a majority coalition, they together represent the most people. This makes perfect sense.

But the rhetoric from the Conservatives, particularly now in Canada (in the UK they went on to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and one which has proven very successful for their own party's policies and fairly disastrous for the Lib Dems) has focused on the idea that a coalition government is somehow anti-democratic, power-usurping and vaguely evil. That if the leader of the opposition formed a coalition with smaller parties, he would be stealing power, ignoring the will of the people. That somehow a minority government representing 30% of the population is more representative than a coalition government representing 50%+.

The rhetoric also says that a coalition government is inherently 'chaotic'. In practice, a minority government, which can occasionally gain support from opposition politicians but has no formal agreement, is far worse. Coalition governments are formed when parties sit down and develop a manifesto that they feel represents their grouped interests, and they generally abide by them unless policy is introduced which is contrary to the agreement and splits opinion. A coalition led by the opposition is no more chaotic than a coalition led by the party with the most seats.

The strangest thing about the opposition to coalition governments is that opponents behave as if coalitions have never worked - as if there are no examples of effective coalition governments. In reality, in many countries around the world with multi-party systems, coalition governments are common practice, and they don't seem to be falling apart.

Some examples of coalition governments currently in power: UK, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, Chile, India, Japan, Indonesia, Kenya, Senegal and Algeria.

(The worst example? Belgium, which has recently passed the 300 days without government landmark because its parties have been unable to form a coalition. But Belgium is plagued by deep regional divides and there is speculation that the country could actually split up because of the divisions. So it's not exactly the most representative example, and is certainly the exception to the rule.)

The important thing is that the idea of coalition governments isn't demonised in the election campaign; firstly, this tends to delegitimise the coalition if it is formed afterward, and hurts the credibility of the leaders who go around proclaiming they wouldn't form coalitions and then go and form them. Secondly, in countries where coalitions are the norm, it's easier to get an idea of what the coalition policies might be after the election - knowing which parties are likely to ally, and which policies are likely to make it through to the coalition document. One of the biggest disappointments for Lib Dem supporters in the UK was the vague assumption that a coalition was more likely with Labour than the Conservatives because Labour was the more leftist party. Some Lib Dem voters would not have voted for a coalition with the Conservatives. And most Lib Dem voters would not have voted for the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition policies, which included raising tuition fees (despite the Lib Dem election promise to lower or abolish them) and massive public spending cuts.

If coalitions are a possibility, the voters need to know what, and who, they're voting for, which is why discussion should be open and transparent, not hampered by false accusations of power-stealing and bad democracy.