Kingmaker or Political Pariah: the influence of fringe parties under Proportional Representation

A concern often raised about proportional representation is that it will launch fringe parties into Parliament, giving them a greater political voice and new levels of influence. While there’s little reason to deny that parties outside the mainstream will gain seats under PR, you need only look at countries already using proportional representation to see how poorly fringe parties would fare in our own parliament.

Take Germany for example.

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – a party with links to neo-Nazis and the far-right Identitarian movement – was founded in 2013 with the goal of abolishing the euro currency and later adopted an overtly Islamophobic anti-immigration posture following Germany’s increased admission of refugees and migrants in 2015. Having announced its policies loud and clear, AfD shocked the country with its 2017 election results: 12.4% of the popular vote and 94 out of 703 seats, placing third among all parties. With such a significant presence in the Bundestag, how did this party impress its ideas on Germany?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The other parties simply ignored them.

Needing 355 seats for a majority, Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU (246 seats) partnered with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (153 seats) to create a 399-seat coalition. This followed the CDU/CSU’s failure to create a coalition with the centre-left Greens (67 seats) and centre-right Free Democratic Party (80 seats).

Meanwhile, AfD and its 94 seats found itself with no leverage in the new Bundestag. Rather than playing kingmaker in parliament, AfD was shut out of power as the other parties formed a united front against them, collectively refusing to collaborate with AfD due to how extreme they considered its policies to be.

This experience demonstrates that while proportional representation gives fringe parties a voice in parliament, their influence is severely limited if their goals don’t align with the public or the priorities of other parties.

In a nutshell, should the people you share the room with consider your ideas abhorrent, you might find your peers carrying on as if you aren’t even there, undermining your very presence and the positions you hold.

What’s more, Germans went to the polls last month with AfD receiving 2.3% fewer votes and 11 fewer seats than its 2017 results. While several factors likely contributed to the drop in support, their setback illustrates the difficulty of having any influence if you get invited to the table and nobody there even wants to talk to you.

In other words, if your party is a pariah outside of parliament, it’s also likely to be one within it.


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Electoral Reform in the News

Proportional Representation continues to make the news after last month’s federal election. Here is a sample of what is being said:


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While Canada is still stuck with First Past the Post, New Zealand is going full steam ahead with a review of its own electoral system.

The review would look at lowering the voting age to 16, the funding of political parties, the length of the parliamentary term and adjusting the country’s current MMP system to make it more proportional.

Notably, the review will not examine whether New Zealand should return to First Past the Post, which the country famously ditched almost 30 years ago in favour of the Mixed-member proportional system it has today.