‘A leadership void’

Across Europe, cabinets are looking shaky. On September 21, France announced a potential new lineup for its government. But this would be a minority cabinet—led by a prime minister from the party that finished fourth in the first round of voting. And the far-right National Rally could bring the government down at any moment with a no-confidence vote in the legislature.

Over in Germany, Olaf Scholz is less popular than any chancellor since his country’s reunification in 1990. In a recent poll, 77 percent of Germans characterized Scholz as a “weak leader.” Even members of his own Social Democratic Party are calling on him to step down before next year’s general elections. His coalition partners, the left-wing Greens and the center-right Free Democrats, are sniping at one another publicly—while Scholz and his finance minister have been arguing in the media about who’s to blame for the government’s inability to put a budget together for next year.

Meanwhile, Bulgaria is about to hold its sixth general election in three years, after one government after another there has fallen.

Political news out of Europe has understandably focused a lot this year on the rise of the nationalist right on the continent—but there’s been another trend running through European current affairs: a growing tendency toward fractious, ineffective governments. Why?

Matthias Matthijs is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Dean Acheson associate professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Matthijs says Europe’s emerging political crises are symptoms of serious, long-term issues: aging populations, a rising cost of living, controversies over immigration, economic adaptations to climate change, and Russia’s tensions with its former Soviet satellite states—that’s exploded in the war in Ukraine.

Europeans increasingly see the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left as failing to solve any of these problems, so voters are increasingly turning to upstart parties—all along the political spectrum, many on the far right and far left. This political fragmentation, as Matthijs puts it, is making it harder to form governments—and making governments that are formed more mismatched and unproductive. That, in turn, is encouraging perceptions that the governments are simply inept—which is only further stoking the popular dissatisfaction behind the rising power of the nationalist right …

Michael Bluhm: In France, a minority government just came into office. It looks like it’s going to have trouble passing any laws. And the far-right National Rally could bring it down at any time. How’d France get here?