France, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria: how ‘grand coalition’ centrism actually breeds extremes – EUobserver

France, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria – all these countries in the past few years show the danger of the ‘consensus trap’. That is, a pattern whenever mainstream parties converge into a broad  governing centre, democratic competition reappears outside the system rather than within. 

Conflict is actually not democracy’s weakness, but its stabiliser. Trouble starts when the centrist parties begin to sound alike.

When moderate left and moderate right converge into a governing  centre, voters lose real choice within the system. When democracy loses its internal opposition, it  begins producing external opposition. This is the consensus trap. 

The trap has a second jaw. A coalition of everyone cannot take a strong stance on contested issues. 

Migration, energy, climate: each demands real choices and tradeoffs. A centrist consensus responds with delay and half-measures calibrated to appease internal factions, which inevitably fail in the  face of reality.

Voters grow frustrated with a system incapable of decisive action. 

France

The clearest contemporary case is France.

In 2017 Emmanuel Macron deliberately built En Marche by absorbing moderates from both left and right. The Socialists fell from 28 percent (2012) to 1.7 percent  (2022). The Republicans fell from 27 percent to under five percent.

The two parties that had governed France since 1958 melted away. When centrist disillusionment with En Marche inevitably came, they were  replaced by hitherto peripheral Le Pen’s National Rally and Mélenchon’s radical-left.

Le Pen’s father had reached the second round as far back as 2002, but the party never broke 15 percent. Under Macron it has climbed past 30 percent. 

Italy

Italy tells the longer story. When corruption scandals brought down the postwar party system in the early 1990s, the new one fell straight back into the consensus trap: Berlusconi’s right normalised, the left professionalised, and their differences narrowed into managerial disputes.

In 2011, this logic reached its endpoint in the Mario Monti government — explicitly technocratic and post-political. In 2013,  the Five Star Movement, founded by a comedian and running on bare anti-system rage, entered parliament with 25 percent of the vote.

Ten years later, Giorgia Meloni won an outright majority. The centrist experiment did not prevent the extremes. It incubated them.

Germany

Germany makes the mechanism visible. For 50 years, the CDU and SPD alternated as clearly distinguishable parties, with no significant anti-system presence.

Then came Angela Merkel’s ‘Grand Coalitions’ — a textbook consensus trap. The CDU has fallen from 41 percent (2002) to under 29 percent; the SPD from 38 percent (1998) to 16 percent.

Meanwhile the hard-right Alternative for Germany has grown from nothing to over 20 percent. Again the hollowed-out centre incubated the extremes. 

The consensus trap operates also at the EU level.

Since 2019, the European Parliament has been  governed by a grand coalition of the centre-right European People’s Party, centre-left S&D and the liberal Renew Europe.

On the questions that actually divide European electorates — migration, energy, defence — this bloc has consistently offered managed ambiguity rather than real answers.

In 2024, voter  frustration with the consensus trap over these issues drove the largest gains for Eurosceptic parties  in the Parliament’s history. 

Bulgaria

Bulgaria has been following the consensus trap in real time. The first decade after 1989 saw clear competition between the Socialist Party and the Union of Democratic Forces. After 2001 that ended.  A succession of ever-weaker centrist formations followed: Simeon’s NDSV, then Boyko Borisov’s GERB 1-2-3, then PP-DB — each promising change rather than coherence, each shorter-lived than the last.

In parallel the periphery grew — from 8.2 percent for Ataka in 2005 to over 14 percent for Vazrazhdane in 2023. 

On 19 April 2026, Progressive Bulgaria (PB) — a movement founded weeks earlier around former  president Rumen Radev — won an outright majority with 44.6 percent. The Socialist party fell below four percent  and left parliament for the first time in 30 years. Decades of ideological dilution had weakened it;  Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine finished it off. 

PB won an outright parliamentary majority with as anti-systemic centre and managed, temporarily,  to contain the protest vote before it drifted to radicals – as Macron did in 2017.

But that’s temporarily. To endure, it will have to become something else. 

Every new political project with broad support eventually confronts the same choice. The first path  is to evolve into a wide, pragmatic centre, aspiring to represent all ‘reasonable’ voters.

In the short term, this can appear stabilising. Long-term, however, it carries the risk of identity erosion and reopening of political space for more radical actors. 

The second path is more demanding yet more durable: a clear political identity, institutionalised  through membership, structures, and European partners.

Democracy does not break under conflict. It breaks when we try to erase it. When parties try  representing everyone, they end up representing no one. And voters go on looking for the next  saviour in the fringes.