Nobody Governs Alone

Después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, muchos países europeos decidieron crear sistemas más representativos.

After the Second World War, many European countries decided to create more representative systems.

No querían repetir los errores del pasado, cuando un solo partido tomó todo el poder.

They didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the past, when a single party took all the power.

That post-war context is doing enormous work here and I think it often goes unsaid.

These aren't just administrative choices about how to count votes.

The memory of what happens when one faction gets absolute power, that's built into the architecture of these systems.

Especialmente en Alemania y en España.

Especially in Germany and Spain.

En España, después de la dictadura de Franco, cuando escribieron la Constitución en 1978, eligieron un sistema proporcional porque querían dividir el poder político.

In Spain, after Franco's dictatorship, when they wrote the Constitution in 1978, they chose a proportional system because they wanted to divide political power.

No querían un gobierno con demasiado control sobre todo.

They didn't want a government with too much control over everything.

You're picking a voting system, but really you're answering a historical question about what went wrong before.

The ballot paper is a kind of document of memory.

Sí, exacto.

Yes, exactly.

Y en España podemos ver ahora lo complicado que puede ser en la práctica.

And in Spain we can now see how complicated it can be in practice.

El gobierno de Pedro Sánchez tiene una coalición muy difícil.

Pedro Sánchez's government has a very difficult coalition.

Necesita el apoyo de partidos muy diferentes, incluso de partidos independentistas de Cataluña.

It needs the support of very different parties, even from Catalan independence parties.

Cada semana es una negociación nueva.

Every week is a new negotiation.

Which brings me to Italy, because if Spain is complicated, Italy has historically been something else entirely.

I was based in Rome briefly in the nineties and I genuinely lost count of how many governments fell while I was reporting there.

Italia es el caso extremo.

Italy is the extreme case.

Desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta los años noventa, Italia tuvo más de cincuenta gobiernos diferentes.

From the end of the Second World War to the nineties, Italy had more than fifty different governments.

Cincuenta.

Fifty.

Las coaliciones se rompían constantemente porque había demasiados partidos y los acuerdos no duraban.

Coalitions constantly broke down because there were too many parties and agreements didn't last.

Era una inestabilidad casi permanente.

It was almost permanent instability.

Here's what I could never resolve about Italy, though: the economy still grew, the country still functioned, people had lives.

Does governmental instability actually damage a society as much as we instinctively assume it does?

Yo creo que sí importa mucho.

I think it does matter a lot.

Cuando un gobierno cambia cada año, es casi imposible hacer reformas grandes.

When a government changes every year, it's almost impossible to make major reforms.

Los ministros cambian, los proyectos cambian, y los problemas más serios nunca se resuelven.

Ministers change, projects change, and the most serious problems never get solved.

Italia tiene problemas económicos y estructurales desde hace muchos años y parte del problema es exactamente eso.

Italy has had economic and structural problems for many years and part of the problem is exactly that.

But look at Germany, stable coalitions, long-term planning, and they still spent fifteen years building a catastrophic dependency on Russian gas.

Stability doesn't automatically produce wisdom.

Sometimes it just produces very organized, very patient mistakes.

Tienes razón en eso, sí.

You're right about that, yes.

Pero el problema del gas ruso fue una decisión de varios gobiernos durante muchos años, no de una sola coalición.

But the Russian gas problem was a decision of several governments over many years, not just one coalition.

Y cuando fue necesario cambiar, Alemania pudo reaccionar con bastante rapidez porque tenía un gobierno estable y fuerte.

And when it was necessary to change, Germany was able to react quite quickly because it had a stable and strong government.

Eso no es fácil cuando el gobierno cambia cada año.

That's not easy when the government changes every year.

The Netherlands is the case that genuinely arrested me when I first looked at it closely.

After their 2021 elections, it took them over two hundred days to form a government.

More than six months.

The country just sat there, technically headless.

Sí, y no fue la primera vez.

Yes, and it wasn't the first time.

Pero lo interesante es que durante esos meses, los Países Bajos funcionaron bastante bien.

But the interesting thing is that during those months, the Netherlands functioned quite well.

Los servicios públicos continuaron, la economía no colapsó, la vida diaria continuó casi normal.

Public services continued, the economy didn't collapse, daily life continued almost normally.

Eso dice algo muy importante sobre la diferencia entre el gobierno y el estado.

That says something very important about the difference between the government and the state.

It says bureaucracies are more durable than governments.

Which is either deeply reassuring or deeply alarming, depending on your feelings about unelected institutions running things quietly in the background.

Las dos cosas al mismo tiempo, posiblemente.

Both things at the same time, possibly.

Pero la diferencia fundamental con el sistema anglosajón es esta: en un sistema proporcional, casi nunca hay un ganador claro.

But the fundamental difference with the Anglo-Saxon system is this: in a proportional system, there is almost never a clear winner.

En Gran Bretaña o en Estados Unidos, hay un ganador y un perdedor, y el ganador gobierna solo.

In Britain or the United States, there is a winner and a loser, and the winner governs alone.

En Europa, normalmente hay seis o siete partidos en el parlamento y todos tienen que hablar.

In Europe, there are normally six or seven parties in parliament and they all have to talk.

I was in Berlin during the weeks after the 2005 German elections and I remember this odd suspended feeling in the city.

Negotiations happening in hotel rooms and parliamentary offices and nobody really knowing what the government was going to look like.

For someone trained on American elections, where you know the answer by midnight, it was genuinely disorienting.

Entiendo perfectamente esa sensación.

I understand that feeling perfectly.

Para alguien de fuera, parece un caos total.

For someone from outside, it looks like total chaos.

Pero para los alemanes, o para los españoles, es el proceso normal.

But for Germans, or for Spaniards, it's the normal process.

Saben que las negociaciones llevan semanas, a veces meses.

They know that negotiations take weeks, sometimes months.

No es una crisis.

It's not a crisis.

Es simplemente el trabajo político después de las elecciones.

It's simply the political work that comes after the elections.

Walk me through what actually happens in those rooms.

Because a coalition agreement is one thing written on paper, but in practice somebody's campaign promises end up in the bin.

Somebody's core voters are going to feel betrayed.

How do you manage that?

Siempre pasa eso.

That always happens.

En las negociaciones, los partidos hablan de los temas más importantes: la economía, la sanidad, la educación, el medio ambiente.

In the negotiations, parties talk about the most important issues: the economy, healthcare, education, the environment.

Cada partido quiere cosas diferentes, pero tienen que encontrar una posición común.

Each party wants different things, but they have to find a common position.

A veces un partido pequeño consigue un ministerio importante a cambio de apoyar las políticas del partido más grande.

Sometimes a small party gets an important ministry in exchange for supporting the policies of the larger party.

And when a coalition collapses mid-term, which happens, what's the mechanism?

You can't just leave the parliament empty until the next scheduled date.

Depende del país, pero normalmente hay elecciones anticipadas.

It depends on the country, but normally there are early elections.

En España pasó varias veces.

In Spain it happened several times.

En 2019, España tuvo dos elecciones generales en el mismo año porque era imposible formar un gobierno estable.

In 2019, Spain had two general elections in the same year because it was impossible to form a stable government.

Dos elecciones en doce meses.

Two elections in twelve months.

Fue muy difícil y costó mucho dinero y mucha energía política.

It was very difficult and it cost a lot of money and a lot of political energy.

Two national elections in one calendar year.

And I think a lot of people don't realize how expensive that is, not just financially, but in terms of public attention.

Elections require something from citizens.

You can't keep going back to the well indefinitely.

Exactamente, y eso crea frustración y también desconfianza en los partidos políticos.

Exactly, and that creates frustration and also distrust in political parties.

La gente siente que los políticos no pueden trabajar juntos y eso es muy malo para la democracia en general.

People feel that politicians can't work together and that's very bad for democracy in general.

Which connects to what feels like the defining challenge for European coalition politics right now, because across the continent you're seeing the rise of parties, mostly on the far right, that mainstream parties refuse to work with.

Which means the pool of available partners keeps shrinking.

Sí, es un problema muy serio en este momento.

Yes, it's a very serious problem right now.

En muchos países europeos, los partidos de extrema derecha reciben muchos votos, pero los partidos tradicionales no quieren trabajar con ellos.

In many European countries, far-right parties receive many votes, but traditional parties don't want to work with them.

Entonces formar una mayoría es muy complicado.

So forming a majority is very complicated.

Pasó en Suecia, en Bélgica, en los Países Bajos.

It happened in Sweden, in Belgium, in the Netherlands.

Y a veces, después de mucho tiempo sin gobierno, algunos partidos deciden trabajar con la extrema derecha.

And sometimes, after a long time without a government, some parties decide to work with the far right.

Y eso cambia muchas cosas.

And that changes a lot of things.

It's a democratic dilemma with no clean exit.

If a party wins fifteen percent of the vote and you exclude them from every coalition on principle, you're effectively telling fifteen percent of the electorate that their choice doesn't count.

But if you bring them in, you normalize something that many people feel shouldn't be normalized.

I've turned that question over for years.

No tengo una respuesta fácil tampoco.

I don't have an easy answer either.

Pero lo que sí creo es que el sistema de coaliciones, con todos sus problemas y su lentitud, obliga a los partidos a hablar entre ellos, a negociar, a buscar soluciones juntos.

But what I do believe is that the coalition system, with all its problems and its slowness, forces parties to talk to each other, to negotiate, to look for solutions together.

Eso es bueno para la democracia.

That's good for democracy.

El problema real no es el sistema.

The real problem isn't the system.

El problema es cuando los partidos ya no pueden encontrar ningún punto común.

The problem is when parties can no longer find any common ground.

And maybe that's what coalitions ultimately reveal: they don't create the divisions in a society, they just make them visible and force you to manage them in public rather than pretending they don't exist.

Sí, me gusta mucho eso.

Yes, I really like that.

Una coalición es, en cierta manera, un mapa de los conflictos reales de una sociedad.

A coalition is, in a certain way, a map of a society's real conflicts.

No los esconde.

It doesn't hide them.

Los pone en la mesa y dice: ahora tenéis que resolverlo juntos.

It puts them on the table and says: now you have to resolve this together.

Actually, something you said earlier is still sitting with me.

You used the phrase 'a cambio de' when you were describing how small parties trade their support for ministerial positions.

It's a phrase I've heard in Spain and I half understand it, but I want to make sure listeners catch it properly because it keeps coming up.

'A cambio de' significa 'in exchange for'.

'A cambio de' means 'in exchange for'.

Es una expresión muy útil en muchas situaciones.

It's a very useful expression in many situations.

Por ejemplo: 'Te ayudo a cambio de algo.' O en política: 'Apoyamos esta ley a cambio de más inversión en educación.' La estructura es siempre igual: 'a cambio de' más un sustantivo o un verbo en infinitivo.

For example: 'I'll help you in exchange for something.' Or in politics: 'We support this law in exchange for more investment in education.' The structure is always the same: 'a cambio de' plus a noun or a verb in the infinitive.

In exchange for.

And it works well beyond politics, right?

You could use it at a market, between friends making a trade, any time there's a deal being struck.

It's one of those phrases that once you notice it you start hearing it everywhere.

Exactamente.

Exactly.

Es muy versátil.

It's very versatile.

Y Fletcher, ya que hablamos de intercambios: tú aprendes español a cambio de escuchar mis opiniones sobre política europea durante cuarenta minutos.

And Fletcher, since we're talking about exchanges: you learn Spanish in exchange for listening to my opinions about European politics for forty minutes.

Creo que es un trato bastante justo para los dos.

I think that's a pretty fair deal for both of us.