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The general way this works (at least in most European countries)...is that you have a national election with multiple parties. In terms of quantity...it might be six...it might be forty. It’s rarely less than six. There will always be two bigger parties (center-left, center-right) and between the two bigger parties, they typically take forty-percent, or more of the combined total vote.

So you end up with a winner. The mandate upon the winner is that you need to find partners to run the government, and your combined representation should be 50-percent or more. It’s healthy to have five to ten percent more.

So you go out to the five or more parties to talk partnerships. You are basically promising two things (cabinet/ministry jobs, and support to legislate on their ‘promises’). It’s very likely that at least one of the parties is so far out on the political spectrum, that you can cross them off (like Communists or extreme socialists). This process of ‘talking’ takes about four to six weeks. If you fail on the first talk....you go to the next party deal and talk there. There’s always a rule that says after 90 days, if you haven’t gotten a deal...either the number two winner of the election gets a shot, or you do an entire new election.

In this Sweden episode, something a bit unusual occurred with a far-right party getting the winner position, and at least two parties absolutely refusing to partner with them. After talking to the lesser parties and finding limited options...they are going to a rarely used rule which says you can partner with someone and have less than 50-percent of the membership....being a minority government. It means every time legislation comes up that you’d like to pass...the odds are you will never pass anything. This minority-government idea is pretty screwed up and it’ll just guarantee early elections because people are disgruntled.

There are two plus sides to this ‘game’. First, you avoid extreme hostile confrontations or insults in elections because you will have to partner with someone. Second, when you draft legislation...you feel pretty confident that you’ve got the votes to pass it, but there will be internal meetings to ensure the draft has something always there for the partner-party. The big negative is that multiple parties really means a far extreme spectrum. There’s generally a rule as well that you have to get five-percent of the votes in an election....to earn seats in the parliament...which takes out the bulk of the minor parties and usually means only five or six parties in the parliament.

I might add a historical note here...going back to the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s...parties were appearing out of thin air and getting five to ten percent of the vote, and disappearing/modifying/morphing by the next election. This was a major weakness to the Republic.