The End of the Cordon Sanitaire

Without a broad and stable center, everyone has no choice but to work with the extremes

Seat projection for the Bundestag based on current polling, from PolitPro.

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Wolfgang Munchau has an excellent piece in UnHerd about the state of play in Germany with respect to immigration. In response to increasing popular restrictionist sentiment, Friedrich Merz—leader of the conservative CDU and almost certainly the next German chancellor—has tacked to the right on the issue, calling for the restoration of passport controls at the German border. This would shatter the EU’s Schengen area, in one stroke ending a key aspect of European unity.

It’s a radical policy departure for the center-right party, and the point of the move, politically-speaking, is to steal an issue from the far-right AfD and thereby blunt their rise and keep them out of power. The problem is that, if it succeeds, then Merz has to deliver on his promise—and the only way he can do so is with the help of the AfD, since his other prospective coalition partners (the center-left SPD and/or the Greens) will strongly oppose such a move. Merz’s only options then are to form a coalition with the AfD, bringing them explicitly into power, or to pass his proposed legislation with their outside support, which would bring them effectively into power if not explicitly so. Either way, he’ll be strengthening precisely the party he aimed to weaken by stealing their issue.

Of course, he has the third option of failing to deliver on his promise for the sake of holding together an anti-AfD coalition. In that case, though, he’ll have handed the AfD a great issue for the next election and demonstrated as plainly as possible to voters that the AfD is the only party they can trust to actually deliver on their issues. Unless voter preferences change on the substance, this kind of betrayal should redound to their enormous benefit in the next election—which could be very soon if a heterogeneous CDU-led coalition fractures due to unpopularity. Perhaps it was a mistake to steal the issue in the first place? But of course, had he not done so, that would have left the AfD free to capitalize on it now, which would probably result in a stronger electoral showing in the upcoming election, and an even more difficult decision about forming a coalition either with them or without them.

This is the paradox of the cordon sanitaire: the very act of boxing something out can easily end up bringing it in.

We see the same dynamic playing out in country after country. In France, Emmanuel Macron started his presidency as the vibrant, radical centrist alternative to both a moribund establishment split between tweedle-center-left and tweedle-center-right and the more alarming far-right alternative of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. He’s successfully replaced the old establishment with himself, but the RN has only grown in strength—and has been joined by a new set of extremists on the far left. In the second round of the last legislative elections, the left, far-left and center cooperated to deny the RN representation commensurate with their percentage of the vote in the first round. The result was a parliament in which no coalition can be formed without the support of either the far-left or the RN itself, and therefore a succession of caretaker center-right governments can only survive on the sufferance of the RN, who can topple them at will (as they did the first, of Michel Barnier, but have declined to do yet to his successor, François Bayrou). Meanwhile in recent presidential election polls, Marine Le Pen leads the first round by a comfortable margin and leads or ties every second round possibility.

France’s politics is complicated by two different cordons sanitaires, one against Le Pen and one against the rabble-rousing and antisemitic-leaning Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise. Israel is riven by several different categories of refusal. For generations, there was a cordon sanitaire against the independent Arab parties (whether secular communist, nationalist or Islamist) because they were non- or anti-Zionist. As the ultra-Orthodox parties grew in power and made greater and greater fiscal and social demands, new parties arose organized explicitly around a refusal to sit with them in government and determined to end their draft exemptions and other official favoritism, while the ultra-Orthodox parties themselves shifted from being willing coalition partners to any government to being an integral part of the right-wing coalition. Then, as new parties emerged on the far right that openly venerated racists like the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and the terrorist Baruch Goldstein, these were also deemed beyond the pale. Finally, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted for corruption but refused to step down and face trial, he was deemed persona non grata by his otherwise natural allies in the center-right.

All of these choices had logic to them. But there is literally no electoral majority of any kind that could uphold all of these exclusions, and they have all since collapsed. The moderate Islamist and non-Zionist Ra’am party entered into the government led by the far-right Naftali Bennett that finally if briefly toppled Netanyahu. I personally consider that event to have been a major milestone in Israeli democracy, but the resulting coalition was inherently unstable and was succeeded by the current government, which brought racist far-right parties into a government led by Netanyahu. More recently, New Hope, a center-right party formed explicitly to oust Netanyahu rejoined his government, giving him some ballast to survive the defection of his far-right allies. Perhaps the next election will bring a coalition to power that, like Bennett’s but more ideologically-coherent, excludes the ultra-Orthodox and includes Ra’am, and is able to enact fundamental changes to the religious status quo. Whether it does or not, though, all the “unacceptable” parties are plainly part of the electoral game at this point; no one is beyond the pale.

I have come around to the view that this is the only way things can work. It doesn’t even matter if you have proportional representation or a first-past-the-post Westminster system. Yascha Mounk is right that proportional representation would not solve America’s political problems, but that’s because coalition building is messy and difficult in any electoral system where there is objectively complex heterogeneity in the electorate. Labour won an enormous majority in Britain in the last election on the strength of a very poor showing in the popular vote because the conservative vote was split between the Tories under Rishi Sunak and Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party. Those two forces genuinely do not agree on the substance of politics; they disagree on a very fundamental level not only about where to compromise for a winning strategy but about what should be their fundamental political goals. Nonetheless, they will either rejoin together, as they briefly did to power Boris Johnson’s massive 2019 victory, or they will continue to empower a deeply unpopular center-left government that they both oppose and could easily topple.

That’s the same choice Republicans were faced with when Donald Trump first appeared on the scene: either to split the party and empower the Democrats or to hang together even at the price of potentially transforming the party in a radical way. The overwhelming bulk of the party first chose temporary accommodation and then chose transformation; those who chose the path of principled division are now in permanent and powerless exile. Meanwhile, the new fully Trumpified coalition is itself split in ways that will be impossible to reconcile in policy terms: on the roles of tech and agribusiness, on trade and immigration, on foreign policy and on the role of religion in public life. Trump the man can stand above it all, but eventually decisions will have to be made, and some faction or other will notice that he didn’t decide in their favor.

The same dynamic obtains on the left. La France Insoumise and Ensemble were prepared to cooperate in legislative races; they’re not prepared to cooperate to govern. But there’s no majority without either the far-left or the far-right, and the next presidential election will likely pit Marine Le Pen against either a center-right type like Édouard Philippe or a far-left type like François Ruffin in the second round, posing a painful choice to either far-left or centrist voters respectively. Here in America, meanwhile, the Democrats are currently licking their wounds while also gearing up for battle between the left and the center, with each side making claims that the other is to blame for the loss to Donald Trump. This debate about strategy, though, is actually a smoke screen for the real issue: that the two factions do not want the same things.

This is what the last eight years (maybe the last sixteen years) has taught both sides: the centrists and leftists thought that they disagreed about politics, about how far and how fast you can safely go. In fact they disagree about substance. The left wants things that centrists actively think are bad—not just bad for them politically but bad for the country substantively—while the centrists want to stop leftists from doing things that they not only think are good but absolutely fundamental to their politics. The Biden administration governed overwhelmingly from the perspective of coalition management, making sure every group and faction felt loved, and instead wound up being deeply unpopular with left, right and center alike. The next Democratic nominee and president will behave differently, I have no doubt—but how will they assert their authority over such division?

I don’t honestly know. It’s one thing to compromise for political expediency; everyone who isn’t a political infant understands the need for that. It’s another thing to realize that you are in coalition with people who do not share your goals or values—while also realizing that there is no way to win without forming some such coalition. But that’s the reality, and all sides need to face it. Fantasies of splitting America’s two-party system into six or seven or however many fragments would only push out into the open what is already clearly true but that many continue to deny. Enough of us believe things that are not just rejected by but are considered unacceptable to other members of our “natural” coalition that we have no choice but to work with people who, under other circumstances, we could reasonably consider our political enemies.

That’s a formula for political instability and/or strongman rule. And look where we are.