I see that the French government has collapsed, for what seems the umpteenth time. Coming hard on the heels of the German government’s problems, there is of course a common thread: both were coalition governments, where two (of the many) political parties — some with diametrically-opposed platforms — decided to create an alliance to govern the country. Both, of course, were doomed to fail, especially, as in the case with the Frogs, that the opposition party, the much-reviled Front National (or National Front, in English) was almost as large as either of the two melded parties, so the non-confidence vote brought by the FN needed only the support of one of the coalition parties to topple the government. (The fact that the coalition, cobbled together simply to prevent the FN from assuming power, was always doomed to fail except in the minds of the idiots with the anti-FN mindset.)
I’ve often spoken with Americans who think that our two-party system is flawed, in that each party is often riven by various key issues which actually find favor with a small (or large) proportion of the other one. Abortion, for example, is one such issue: where there may be a small minority of pro-abortion politicians in the Republican Party whose ideology thereof is closer to a majority of abortion supporters over on the Evil Side of the room. The problem, of course, is that these are generally single issues, around which it would be impossible to form, say, a Pro-Abortion Party to be pitted against an Anti-Abortion Party. Ditto the Greens, ditto guns, ditto Trump, etc. etc.
Honestly, while our current two-party system is not ideal, it sure is better than the European multi-party. Small, contained chaos around single issues is, I think, far preferable to the systemic instability of a multi-party system, almost without regard to the relative merits of their various positions.
I should also point out that a fragmented polity is generally vulnerable to external threats or danger — witness the chaos of the French Third Republic in the 1930s, which in no small part enabled France’s crushing defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940. (A sizeable proportion of Frenchmen, and their parties, actually welcomed the prospect of a strong national government on the lines of Hitler’s Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, simply because they were sick of dealing with the decades-long chaos of multi-party politics and weakness.)
In passing, imagine there was a single-issue party named, oh, the Anyone But Trump Party in our polity (composed of both Democrats and Republicans), and toss that into the standard Democrat/Republican mix.
Ugh. If you can see only chaos resulting from that little political soup, then you’ll understand the European situation.
