Democracy in three parties

And because the global problems were not enough, I said we should also create our own made in Romania problems, specific to our corner of the world. It has been a while since some politicians, consultants, and analysts have drawn our attention to the fact that the fundamental value of our political system seems to be stability. Practically, since the pandemic, from the elections that formed the tandem Marcel Ciolacu – Nicolae Ciucă (or vice versa, so that no one remains upset), voices have emerged that have spoken out against sacrificing ideological purity in the name of stability. As it turns out, it is bad for the metabolism of democracy in our beautiful republic to have the liberals and social democrats hand in hand for so long, because all the textbooks say that the left and right should fight (politically, of course) against each other, not cooperate for governance.

Those younger may not remember, but a similar story happened during the presidency of Traian Băsescu and the USL – and back then after several unnatural ideological coalitions. Or one more unnatural than another, in any case. PNL with PDL, then PSD with PDL, then the great opposition coalition PSD-PNL (USL) – during the times of uninominal voting and the terrible decline in the president's popularity.

Until a few years ago, polls showed that Romanians were inclined to the idea that they are either right-wing or left-wing, and these categories of ideological reception tended to overlap (and not infrequently also tendentiously) over certain socio-demographic segments. For a while now (immediately after the infamous pandemic), this public appetite to identify on one side or the other of the ideological axis has faded, and the political compass has also been populated with the Europeanism-autochthonism axis, an interesting variation of the mainstream-anti-system axis.

It should be said that, in general, an ideological system of internal politics is based not only on a left-right line but on two axes – just like a compass. Left-right, respectively, authoritarianism-libertarianism. And the ideological identification, both of the parties and of the public, appears somewhere at the intersection of the two. Of course, alongside these, depending on the specific context, regional, local, cultural, historical, etc., others also appear.

Sometimes, these ideological alliances are conjunctural: pro-presidential or against the president, pro-European vs. pro-Russian (the case of R. Moldova), pro-Soviet/pro-American (during the Cold War, in some African and Asian countries) or who knows what other themes dominate at a given moment a political spectrum or another.

Let us not forget that since the mid-2000s, our political system has taken on a form that predisposes to ideological compromises, being dominated by three relatively large parties. Back then it was about PSD, PNL, and PD (PDL). Later, through the merger of PNL with PDL, it seemed that we were moving towards a more stable electoral formula, with two super-parties, one left and one right (PSD and PNL), plus some smaller, at most medium ones. After the pandemic elections, this third empty space was gradually filled by AUR.

Mathematically speaking, the system with three large parties is the most unstable, because we usually talk about the impossibility of forming a government after elections without the cooperation of two of them, under the conditions in which they have three significantly different doctrines. So coalition governments are mandatory, and majorities are usually formed only through the cooperation of at least two of the three large parties, setting aside ideological purities.

In the long term, this leads to a decrease in the weight of ideology in, let’s say, the mix of marketing of the parties that populate the respective political system. Is this a loss? It can be. In the context where ideas no longer differentiate between electoral offers, the electoral body will be vulnerable to a challenger who tells them things about the problems that the mainstream parties avoid addressing. And thus you go from a democracy with three usual parties to a democracy with two usual parties and one anti-system.

Then, the mainstream vs. challenger axis becomes the most important ideologically and relies on the talent of the first to present the discourse on stability. As it has been said, political stability is like health. It becomes more interesting when you no longer have it.