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50 ways to leave a coalition – and how to govern in the final phase

How will government work in the final months of the Coalition? How will the two parties (eventually) part ways? And what challenges will the Civil Service face in the period of growing political differentiation up until the election?

These questions – and more – are the subject of a seminar at the Institute for Government – ‘50 Ways to Leave a Coalition’. In practice, there may not be 50 distinct scenarios, but as our panellists from the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden will illustrate, there are quite a range of potential endgames. In the Netherlands, for instance, few recent coalitions have lasted the full four-year term. Disputes over budgets, foreign policy and immigration have triggered early splits over the past decade. And the parties responsible for coalition collapses have tended to lose out in the following election. The last coalition in Ireland also came to a sticky end, as the smaller Green Party withdrew a few months from the finish line, in the midst of the financial crisis. The party had hoped to save at least a few seats by distancing themselves from the unpopular Fianna Fail. Yet both parties were decimated at the polls, with the Greens wiped out altogether. German coalitions tend to last the full four years – there is a deeply-rooted aversion to government instability borne out of Weimar history, and a strong constitutional bar to early elections that helps in this regard. There are exceptions though – in 2005 Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder engineered a vote of no confidence in his own government hoping the early election would bolster his authority within his own party. This gamble did not pay off either. Sweden – at least in recent years – stands at the other end of the spectrum from the unstable Dutch. Its four-party ‘Alliance for Sweden’ government has pre-negotiated a joint coalition platform prior to the past two elections, and is currently doing so for a third time. This approach has brought success for Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfelt and his Moderate Party, though the three junior partners have been squeezed at the polls. As for the UK, the expectation of mutually-assured destruction in the event of collapse is why most commentators and participants in the UK coalition remain convinced that the Cameron-Clegg administration will go the full distance. Assuming this is correct – and it is questionable whether the certainty about this would stand up to Nate Silver-esque scrutiny – how can we expect the nature of government to change up till 2015? Certainly we can expect even more outright disagreement between the two parties. We may even see the occasional vote in Parliament where collective responsibility has to be suspended – as has already occurred over Leveson, constituency boundary changes and the EU referendum. This is unusual, but probably not dangerous so long as the two sides continue to agree on fiscal matters, and there is clear agreement between them on when and how they will disagree. More concerning is when the two sides seek opportunities to score points off each other without warning. Naturally, this is most likely when debate shifts to the parties’ respective post-2015 plans, although recent spats over free schools and green taxes have been triggered by one side or the other seeking to disown parts of the existing coalition programme. Watch out too for tensions within particular ministerial teams working on coalition fault lines such as climate change, Europe or immigration. The nature of Whitehall gives the secretary of state a great deal of power within their own fiefdom – the risk is that they use this to undermine or shut out junior ministers from the other side. The unlamented ‘Go Home’ vans were apparently rolled out by the Home Office without the LibDem minister in the department being consulted. The policy was swiftly abandoned, but at the expense of worsened relationships in the Coalition. As things stand, a full five-year term may well be the most likely scenario, but there is a difference between survival and effective government. The latter requires that underneath the occasional row, the core relationships and shared priorities of the coalition remain intact. If trust begins to erode – particularly at the top of the Coalition – then one of the 49 other scenarios may yet come into play.

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