Critical Elections

Abstract

In the successive national elections of May and June 2012, the previous party system of polarized bipartism collapsed and took with it the potential for parties to govern singlehandedly. To make sense of the emerging patterns of party competition, I propose a classification of the significant political parties into three groups consisting of: old populists now turned into reluctant liberals; new populists emerging on both the left and the right; and non-democrats occupying the far-left and the far-right of the political spectrum.