The two-party system that George Washington warned about in his Farewell Address is proving to be a bigger problem than ever after almost 230 years.
It should be mentioned that these were different parties, namely the Democratic-Republican Party led by Jefferson and the Federalist Party led by Hamilton. Although the parties changed, the system remained the same. The trend in recent years has been an ever-widening gap between the Democrats and the Republicans, where the Democrats moved to the left of the median between 2012-2016, as both parties were previously on the right, and now hold a position similar to the rest of the center-left parties in Western Europe, and the Republicans are further to the right of what is the standard center-right party in the “Western world.”
As an illustration, I used a graphic based on data from the Manifesto Project, published by the New York Times in 2019. It should also be noted that the positions of both Democrats and Republicans refer to their positions in 2016, meaning the data does not include Donald Trump’s current presidential campaign. Everyone can make up their own minds as to whether Trump is pushing the Republican Party to greater extremes or bringing it closer to the median.
For comparison, the Republican Party is closer to the German Alternative for Germany party (AfD) than to the British Conservative Party, while the German AfD is so extremist in European politics that other far-right and nationalist parties refuse to cooperate with it, which can be seen in the distribution of the European Parliament after the last elections, where the original European fraction Identity and Democracy split into two other factions, namely the Europe of Sovereign Nations, in which the German AfD is the main and de facto sole significant political force, and Patriots for Europe, into which most of the populist, conservative and nationalist parties in Europe have regrouped in an attempt to stop being linked of the extremist parties like the AfD. One of the parties that cut itself off from the AfD in this way was the French National Rally led by Marine Le Pen, which has been praised several times in the past by Donald Trump.
As another example of how far to the “right” American policy is compared to the rest of Europe, we can take universal health care paid by public money. Even the tents to the right of the Republican Party in the graphic above are not talking about its end. This institution is so important to Europeans that there is virtually no political force that would be in favor of abolishing it. In the Czech Republic, in 2008, the opposition centre-left party won the strongest electoral result in history in every region on the basis of criticism of a health care reform proposal under the centre-right government, which wanted to introduce a fee of 1.3$ per doctor’s visit and 2.6$ per day spent in hospital, because until then these procedures had been completely free. In the UK in 2023, a BMG poll asked people for the greatest symbol of “Britishness,” where for most Britons that symbol was their national universal health care system, the NHS, which beat both the Royal Family and the flag of the United Kingdom in that poll.
How the far right is being blocked in European countries
The vast majority of countries in Europe use a proportional electoral system, in which all parties that exceed a minimum threshold are represented in the legislature in the proportion that corresponds to their electoral result. This leads to parties around the median of the political spectrum coming together precisely to ‘block’ extreme parties from participating in government. For example, just in France, 2 parties on the centre-left spectrum, New Popular Front and Ensemble, even agreed and fielded only one candidate in the second round of elections against the extremist National Rally candidate, thus managing to reduce the National Rally’s electoral result by 8.7% compared to the first round.
