{"id":968689,"date":"2026-05-18T12:14:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T12:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/968689\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T12:14:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T12:14:20","slug":"france-germany-italy-bulgaria-how-grand-coalition-centrism-actually-breeds-extremes-euobserver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/968689\/","title":{"rendered":"France, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria: how \u2018grand coalition\u2019 centrism actually breeds extremes \u2013 EUobserver"},"content":{"rendered":"

France, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria \u2013 all these countries in the past few years show the danger of the \u2018consensus trap\u2019. That is, a pattern whenever mainstream parties converge into a broad\u00a0 governing centre, democratic competition reappears outside the system rather than within.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Conflict is actually not democracy\u2019s weakness, but its stabiliser. Trouble starts when the centrist parties begin to sound alike. <\/p>\n

When moderate left and moderate right converge into a governing\u00a0 centre, voters lose real choice within the system. When democracy loses its internal opposition, it\u00a0 begins producing external opposition. This is the consensus trap.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The trap has a second jaw. A coalition of everyone cannot take a strong stance on contested issues.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Migration, energy, climate: each demands real choices and tradeoffs. A centrist consensus responds\u00a0with delay and half-measures calibrated to appease internal factions, which inevitably fail in the\u00a0 face of reality. <\/p>\n

Voters grow frustrated with a system incapable of decisive action.\u00a0<\/p>\n

France<\/strong><\/p>\n

The clearest contemporary case is France. <\/p>\n

In 2017 Emmanuel Macron deliberately built En Marche<\/a> by absorbing moderates from both left and right. The Socialists fell from 28 percent (2012) to 1.7 percent\u00a0 (2022). The Republicans fell from 27 percent to under five percent. <\/p>\n

The two parties that had governed France since 1958 melted away. When centrist disillusionment with En Marche inevitably came, they were\u00a0 replaced by hitherto peripheral Le Pen\u2019s National Rally<\/a> and M\u00e9lenchon\u2019s radical-left.<\/p>\n

Le Pen\u2019s father\u00a0had reached the second round as far back as 2002, but the party never broke 15 percent. Under Macron it\u00a0has climbed past 30 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Italy<\/p>\n

Italy tells the longer story. When corruption scandals brought down the postwar party system in the\u00a0early 1990s, the new one fell straight back into the consensus trap: Berlusconi\u2019s right normalised, the left professionalised, and their differences narrowed into managerial disputes. <\/p>\n

In 2011, this logic\u00a0reached its endpoint in the Mario Monti government \u2014 explicitly technocratic and post-political. In 2013,\u00a0 the Five Star Movement, founded by a comedian and running on bare anti-system rage, entered\u00a0parliament with 25 percent of the vote. <\/p>\n

Ten years later, Giorgia Meloni won an outright majority. The\u00a0centrist experiment did not prevent the extremes. It incubated them.<\/p>\n

Germany<\/p>\n

Germany makes the mechanism visible. For 50 years, the CDU and SPD alternated as clearly\u00a0distinguishable parties, with no significant anti-system presence. <\/p>\n

Then came Angela Merkel\u2019s \u2018Grand\u00a0Coalitions\u2019 \u2014 a textbook consensus trap. The CDU has fallen from 41 percent (2002) to under 29 percent; the\u00a0SPD from 38 percent (1998) to 16 percent.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the hard-right Alternative for Germany has grown from nothing to\u00a0over 20 percent. Again the hollowed-out centre incubated the extremes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The consensus trap operates also at the EU level. <\/p>\n

Since 2019, the European Parliament has been\u00a0 governed by a grand coalition of the centre-right European People\u2019s Party, centre-left S&D and the liberal Renew\u00a0Europe. <\/p>\n

On the questions that actually divide European electorates \u2014 migration, energy, defence \u2014\u00a0this bloc has consistently offered managed ambiguity rather than real answers. <\/p>\n

In 2024, voter\u00a0 frustration with the consensus trap over these issues drove the largest gains for Eurosceptic parties\u00a0 in the Parliament\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bulgaria<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bulgaria has been following the consensus trap in real time. The first decade after 1989 saw clear\u00a0competition between the Socialist Party and the Union of Democratic Forces. After 2001 that ended.\u00a0 A succession of ever-weaker centrist formations followed: Simeon\u2019s NDSV, then Boyko Borisov\u2019s\u00a0GERB 1-2-3, then PP-DB \u2014 each promising change rather than coherence, each shorter-lived than the last. <\/p>\n

In parallel the periphery grew \u2014 from 8.2 percent for Ataka in 2005 to over 14 percent for\u00a0Vazrazhdane in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On 19 April 2026, Progressive Bulgaria (PB) \u2014 a movement founded weeks earlier around former\u00a0 president Rumen Radev \u2014 won an outright majority with 44.6 percent. The Socialist party fell below four percent\u00a0 and left parliament for the first time in 30 years. Decades of ideological dilution had weakened it;\u00a0 Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine finished it off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

PB won an outright parliamentary majority with as anti-systemic centre and managed, temporarily,\u00a0 to contain the protest vote before it drifted to radicals \u2013 as Macron did in 2017. <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s\u00a0temporarily. To endure, it will have to become something else.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every new political project with broad support eventually confronts the same choice. The first path\u00a0 is to evolve into a wide, pragmatic centre, aspiring to represent all \u2018reasonable\u2019 voters. <\/p>\n

In the short\u00a0term, this can appear stabilising. Long-term, however, it carries the risk of identity erosion and\u00a0reopening of political space for more radical actors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second path is more demanding yet more durable: a clear political identity, institutionalised\u00a0 through membership, structures, and European partners. <\/p>\n

Democracy does not break under conflict. It breaks when we try to erase it. When parties try\u00a0 representing everyone, they end up representing no one. And voters go on looking for the next\u00a0 saviour in the fringes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria \u2013 all these countries in the past few years show the danger of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":968690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5310],"tags":[217083,2000,299,1824,270421,239242,248841,252659,270418,266560,270415,270413,270416,248839,266558,270419,239240,252657,270414,270417,248840,266559,270420,239241,252658],"class_list":["post-968689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-typedefinedterm","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-germany","tag-identifier4277","tag-identifier4404","tag-identifier4406","tag-identifier4456","tag-identifier4457","tag-identifier4481","tag-identifier4606","tag-namebulgaria","tag-nameepp","tag-nameeu-politics","tag-namefrance","tag-namegermany","tag-nameitaly","tag-namesd","tag-termcodebulgaria","tag-termcodeepp","tag-termcodeeu-politics","tag-termcodefrance","tag-termcodegermany","tag-termcodeitaly","tag-termcodesd"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=968689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/968690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=968689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=968689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=968689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}