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The German system requires a 5% threshold to be seated; IMO that represents a sizeable chunk of people's viewpoints. And either way, the winning coalition must

• mjn 13y ago
  It sometimes does promote centrism, for example when the right and left parties each need to compete for the support of a centrist party to form a majority coalition. But that isn't an inherent feature of the system, and the opposite can also happen. Coalition politics can pull the government towards a fringe when they rely on a fringe party to reach a majority. This can happen, for example, when the two main blocs (center-right / center-left) each get around 40%, and then the far-left and far-right each get ~10%. One solution in that case is a left-right unity government with 80%. But another one is a left or a right government with barely over 50%, in which the extreme party holds the balance of power. Since the government depends on the extreme party to stay in power, that party is able to extract some concessions that are not desired by the centrist part of the electorate, and which they would not likely have been able to get outside of the coalition horse-trading process. An example of this happening was the 2001-2011 right-wing government in Denmark. The coalition was made up of the traditional center-right parties, together with the anti-immigrant populist movement, Dansk Folkeparti. Since the coalition could not afford to lose DF's ~12% vote, they ended up reluctantly agreeing to a number of anti-immigrant policies that would not otherwise have been passed.