By Sven R. LARSON

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Coalitions are taking over national governments in Europe with only one goal: to keep national conservatives out of government. This is seriously jeopardizing Europe’s future.

Europe is suffering from a lack of governance. There are governments, and they govern, but they do not exercise governance. They are administrators, not political and legislative leaders.

The continent is facing serious long-term problems—and I am not even going to mention the Ukraine war—that cannot be addressed properly unless the art of governance is restored. For that to happen, Europe needs governments that are ideologically homogenous enough and parliamentarily strong enough to lead their nations.

That is not the case today. Before we go on a depressing Tour de Malaise through Europe’s capitals, let me point to the complex policy problem that has caused the decline from governance to mere government administration.

First, we have long-term problems that are centered around the government budget:

• Advocates for better military preparedness demand more defense spending;
• Proponents of the welfare state and high immigration must consider the cost for social benefits programs;
• Sensibly minded people who want lower taxes for more growth are asked to explain where they want to make budget cuts.

In a time when economic growth is very slow, unemployment elevated, and the fiscal situation already tenuous in most EU member states, any fiscal priorities will be difficult to handle. But many governments around the union have decided to make the lives of their government even more difficult to handle.

Secondly, there is the cordon sanitaire, or Brandmauer, or firewall that many parties on the center-left—and some on the right—have decided to put up against parties of a national-conservative bend. Since those parties are increasingly popular, gaining more parliamentary presence with every election, correspondingly, the coalitions to exclude them have less and less of a margin for internal tensions.

Those tensions are not hard to identify: the traditional Right and Left on the ideological scale. The Right prefers lower taxes to give the private sector a little more freedom; the Left prefers expanded entitlements to reduce economic differences.

Since most of today’s important policy issues are tied to government finances, tensions between the Right and the Left are unavoidable. As a consequence, governments in Europe generally have a shorter attention span than they used to. The focus is on keeping a frail coalition together so that it can survive the next consequential parliamentary vote.

Since the ideological tensions are high to begin with in coalitions where the Right and the Left try to coexist, more policy issues than normal become consequential enough to become existential for a ruling coalition. This has the serious consequence of leaving long-term socio-economic problems unaddressed; perhaps the most underappreciated problem is Europe’s slow drift into a state of economic stagnation.

There are plenty of examples of these political hybrids of coalitions around Europe. Their exact configurations vary from country to country, but they all have in common that they are pieced together from the parliamentary parts bin: once the national conservatives are excluded, the political leadership picks and chooses from whatever pieces are left.

Much like Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s epic novel, the coalition builders in Europe’s capitals don’t care where the parts come from. Nor do they care if what they build is a dysfunctional monstrosity; all that matters is that it functions without a national conservative bone in it.

And they do function—provided we apply an overly generous definition of ‘function.’ France is a good example of how a Frankenstein coalition can be operable only if it focuses on surviving the next workday. To this point, the latest prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, is navigating very treacherous waters as he tries to avoid hitting a fiscal rock somewhere.

He promised back in September to “cut back two public holidays as part of efforts to shrink the national deficit.” This rather tepid approach to spending cuts is meant to avoid stirring up storms that capsize his government; since taking office in September, he has already had to resign once.

He succeeded himself, though he was clearly humbled by the street protests early in the fall that called for a ‘block everything’ approach to spending cuts.

Lecornu is not the first French prime minister to lead a Frankenstein coalition. His predecessor, François Bayrou, wanted to push through the same holiday cutbacks as a strategy to minimize its ideological in-fighting.

Ironically, he was stopped from doing so by the very party he wanted to leave out of influence—Marine LePen’s Rassemblement National (RN), on whose support Bayrou depended to even stay in office.

From a parliamentary viewpoint, a government involving RN would stand on much firmer ground. As illustrated by the conflict over Bayrou’s proposed budget changes, such a government would likely make other fiscal priorities. However, the point would be that a more stable government could raise its eyes toward the horizon; the bickering of daily politics would become as influential as it deserves to be.

While the French political elite continued to strike backroom deals to keep RN out, the nation’s fiscal gridlock led to a politically and economically important credit downgrade. Back in September, Fitch sent an alarming message to Paris: get your fiscal house in order, or more credit downgrades are coming.

Even before their downgrade, I warned about the dire consequences if the French political leadership did not get their act together. The downgrade should have sent the alarm flags flying all over Paris. They did not. The main anti-RN political paradigm prevails, and so do its consequences. On the one hand, the French government’s finances and the nation’s economy continue to deteriorate because the coalitions formed have inherent disagreements over how to close the budget deficit.

On the other hand, the RN is actually winning from being excluded from the rooms of power:

The RN’s continued ostracisation from mainstream politics has positioned it as a leading beneficiary of the rumbling malaise. By watching the crisis unfold from the sidelines, it has been able to pick up disgruntled voters.

Germany is at least as politically gridlocked as France, and the reason is the same: a Frankenstein coalition that aims to exclude Alternative für Deutschland at all costs.

To be fair to the German Frankenstein, the current Merz mess is not the first that has tried to govern based on a never-AfD pledge. In July 2024, about six months before Merz took office, a three-party coalition under Chancellor Olaf Scholz passed a budget for the 2025 fiscal year—but only after painful infighting. Within a month, it tore the band-aid off still-healing political wounds from that fight and began another weeks-long negotiation ordeal to stitch together a new budget deal.

Friedrich Merz took over in February based on a coalition between social democrats and the right-of-center CDU/CSU. His life as the leader of a Frankenstein coalition has not been much easier:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) faces one of the most decisive phases of his chancellorship on Thursday, November 27th, as the coalition committee attempts to resolve the escalating pension dispute

Earlier this year, Chancellor Merz put his coalition’s ideological divide in the public spotlight when he announced that Germany no longer can afford its welfare state. Reactions from coalition partner SPD were unmistakable: no reforms without tax hikes and protections for those who are intended to benefit from the welfare state.

Since the only way to plug the hole in the German federal budget is to do what Merz was pointing at, namely structurally do away with the welfare state, his coalition will not be able to accomplish anything of consequence on that front. This puts Germany in a precarious situation: its macroeconomic problems are at least as big as France’s: low economic growth, weak employment, poor capital formation, and a structural deficit in its public finances.

All these problems are getting progressively worse as the parts-bin-based governments are paralyzed by inherent ideological tensions.

We have seen similar problems in Belgium, where they can look forward to a winter of austerity. Their coalition has the same problem as those in France and Germany: the clear intent is to keep Vlaams Belang out of government.

In Austria, a new coalition to exclude the ‘far-right’ FPÖ back in February immediately faced serious budget challenges. The coalition quickly proposed a new ‘temporary’ bank tax as a tool for revenue raising and for deferring deeper conflicts over increasingly tough budget priorities.

However, as the Austrian economy goes the way most of Europe is going, tax revenue will decline and demand for welfare state benefits increase. Inevitably, the question of budget priorities will catch up, even with Austria’s Frankenstein coalition.

The idea of a Frankenstein coalition is spreading throughout Europe. Watch what happens in the Netherlands now and in Sweden after next year’s election.

How far do the architects of the Frankenstein coalitions intend to take Europe before they relent and let the national conservatives, the people’s most popular representatives, be part of their own government? How big must Europe’s economic problems get before childish ideological barriers are torn down and political leaders put the future of their people first?

Original article:  europeanconservative.com