While I'm not a big fan of all of them, Germany saw the rise of three different new parties in the last 40 years (Green, Linke, AFD). They are all relevant poli

While I'm not a big fan of all of them, Germany saw the rise of three different new parties in the last 40 years (Green, Linke, AFD). They are all relevant political players and came out of the existing parties not representing sentiment felt by substantial portions of the electorate. I hate the AFD and Linke, but gotta say this is awesome and how the system should work. I'm not sure what would happen without parties entirely. I expect you'd see some natural alliances between politicians arise and you are back to parties. There is a somewhat related learning from German history. During the Weimar republic Germany had many very small parties represented in there parliament. This led to it becoming very hard to make progress which led to high churn of who was in power and allowed weird candidates to rise and take a shot at it. The criticism was that three parliament is just debating and debating and nothing ever happens. Weimar cycled through an unreasonable amount of politicians and eventually ended up with Hitler. This is why Germany now requires a minimum of 5% of votes for a party before they get any seats. If you'd somehow manage to keep parties from emerging, I'd expect a worse form of this problem to happen.