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Sweden's general election on Sunday was a huge victory for Sweden Democrats, a political party with neo-Nazi origins, that many had feared. Indeed, though the far-right party did not win a huge amount of votes, it did not make it to the top in 2014, and it remained in third place.
But the Swedish election was not quite business as usual, Instead, it is a more subtle but popular one, and it is more likely to be more widely understood than to increase political fragmentation and the decline of dominant political parties.
In particular, the governing Social Democratic Party seems to have had its worst electoral performance in a century. The center-left party had long dominated Swedish political life, leading coalition governments for the vast majority of the 20th century and the early 21st.
The Social Democrats are still the largest party, but they have not had the lead of the past 20 years. Thankfully for them, their most important rival – the center-right Moderate Party – also had a relatively poor showing, losing 3.5 percent of its 2014 vote against considerable problems faced by the governing coalition.
This is not necessarily a dramatic change. Sweden 's own form of parliamentary democracy – which uses proportional representation to distribute seats in the country' s parliament, the Riksdag, according to the proportion of votes they receive – ensures some level of political fragmentation. Both the Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party have all been parties to the working of coalitions; Some would argue that Sweden's other political landscape is a feature, rather than a bug.
However, at present the ruling center-left bloc has only 144 seats in parliament to the right-center's 143. More than 175 seats are needed for a majority. Sweden now looks set for some complicated talks on which side can form a workable goverment. In theory, this might mean that the Sweden Democrats could become a kingmaker, both of them said they would refuse to work with the far-right party.
The growth of the Sweden Democrats in recent elections is certainly one reason for the decline of the dominant political parties and their respective blocs. But it's not just about them. As Sarah de Lange, a professor of political science and an expert in populism at the University of Amsterdam, put it succinctly on Twitter: "The bigger parties are getting smaller and the smaller parties getting bigger."
(The Washington Post)
If this all sounds familiar, you may be remembering last year's Dutch election. Back then, there was widespread concern about Geert Wilders and his anti-immigrant Party for Freedom (PVV). In the end, however, the Wilders' Party is in the second, and the other smaller parts made considerable gains. The incumbent center-right prime minister, Mark Rutte, was still able to form a government without Wilders.
The political fragmentation in the Dutch election: 28 parties were in the ballot in the Netherlands, and there was a notable battle for second place, with three different parties receiving around 12 to 13 percent of the total vote .
The Dutch situation also shows some of the problems that political fragmentation can create. With other governments, they have become more important, they can not do more than they have not done so much. Some critics say that these situations are also important in terms of fringe behavior – a criticism that certainly has emerged from Rutte.
This issue of political fragmentation is most obvious in parliaments that use proportional representation such as Sweden and the Netherlands. However, it may be apparent in other countries, too, that encourages two party systems. The rifts in right-wing and left-wing parts in countries that use first-past-the-post voting, such as Britain or presidential systems as in the United States and France, may be a symptom of the same fragmentation.
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