Professor Uwe Jun from the University of Trier says "that society has become much more strongly diversified." Other values, opinions, and lifestyles have emerged, "and they are not resonating with the big parties anymore, because the big parties are far too broad, and don't stand for specific interests." That is challenging the very existence of mainstream parties. Professor Oskar Niedermayer of the Free University in Berlin adds that the big parties have had to "bundle very different interests" in order to remain big. The refugee question has shown how divided society is, and how tough that's been for the mainstream parties to address. [...]
Up until the 1980s, Austria was also in this group, with the special case that the Social Democrats and the conservative Austrian People's Party formed grand coalitions for almost two-thirds of the period following World War II. It was precisely this "eternal grand coalition" aimed at consensus building that led to the rise of the Freedom Party, or FPÖ. [...]
Niedermayer also doesn't see any "danger that Germany will develop the kind of circumstances common in Italy." Should a complicated coalition building process fail, the "two mainstream parties could shoulder the impact." Niedermayer is critical of introducing a majority electoral system like in Britain. He says the primary goal of such a system is forming a government that's capable of acting. In the worst case, a defeated minority goes without representation, "because the majority is the majority." He says proportional representation is much better at reflecting various interests in parliament. "We should keep [the current German] system, even if government formation were to become more difficult as a result of stronger fragmentation of our party system," he said.
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