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Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! party
Forward! Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! didn’t even exist until 2016. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images
Forward! Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! didn’t even exist until 2016. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

Democracy counts: why the average political party lasts for only 43 years

This article is more than 6 years old

Britain has a tradition of long-established political groupings – but in other democratic countries, the left, right and centre constantly reinvent themselves. Vive la change?

England’s – later Britain’s – parliamentary system has been around in some form since at least the 13th century. So it ought not to come as a surprise that our political parties have proved to be unusually durable, too.

After all, the Conservative party emerged in its modern configuration in the years after the 1832 Reform Act. Labour was founded in 1900. The SNP, in many ways the new kid on the block at Westminster, dates from 1928, and Plaid Cymru from 1925. Sinn Féin is older still, established in 1905. But, by international standards, they are all dinosaurs.

France, for instance, is now governed by a party, En Marche!, that didn’t even exist two years ago; it was founded by Emmanuel Macron in 2016 to support his successful presidential bid. Italy is ruled by the Democratic party, which dates from 2007.

Although France and Italy seem unusual for the constant reinvention of their political parties in recent years, they are in fact more typical of parliamentary democracies than Britain, which is supposedly the mother of such systems.

An analysis this week underlines the point. It calculates that the average political party in the world’s parliamentary democracies has a life span of just 43 years. The survey looked at the 21 countries with party and parliamentary systems that date back to 1950. France and Italy have seen nine political parties finish in the top two in their elections during this period. Britain has witnessed just two.

There are many reasons for the contrast. Britain has not experienced the wartime collapse or revolutionary change that many nations in Europe have had to deal with. And Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system places an exceptionally high barrier to entry against new parties, of the kind that France’s presidentially led system does not have.

Britain may seem to have a renewed two-party system – 89% of voters voted Conservative or Labour in the 2017 general election, and parties such as the Communists, the Natural Law party and the Referendum party have been and gone. But the party isn’t over for all their rivals. If the latest analysis is right, the Greens (founded 1985), the Liberal Democrats (1988) and Ukip (1993) won’t be disappearing any time soon.

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