The shrinking big tents

[xchrom]

http://www.economist.com/node/18621743

A TUBBY, bespectacled man leads his Eurosceptic party into third place in a tight Finnish election. In a German state ruled by the Christian Democrats for 58 years, the Greens come top, led by a former teacher who will be the party’s first state premier. In the Netherlands the success of an extravagantly coiffed populist has led mainstream parties to court him.

Across Europe, once-dominant political parties are seeing their support fragment (see chart). Some “natural” parties of government, such as Fianna Fail in Ireland and the Social Democrats in Sweden, are out in the cold after decades of hegemony. In Britain and Germany systems in which power alternated between centre-left and centre-right for generations have been upset by the strength of smaller parties. A new politics has emerged in which old allegiances have frayed, political identities have blurred and voters’ trust in familiar parties has crumbled. One result is that voter turnout has fallen almost everywhere.

Recent elections have laid bare the established parties’ woes, but the causes go back decades. One is the decline of institutions that linked individuals to parties—the church in countries with a tradition of Christian democracy, or trade unions that channelled funds (and votes) to left-wing parties. With pews empty and unions shrinking to a mostly public-sector rump, old parties are seeing their membership lists shrivel and their financing dry up.

Class allegiances and tribal ties have also lost their force. Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties could once rely on millions of “votes for life”. No longer. Voting has become more a matter of consumer choice than of ideological fealty. The cosy consensus that so often marked post-war politics is gone. “People are no longer spending 20 years in a party, a union or even a job,” says Bruno Cautrès at Sciences Po university in Paris. “They don’t like organisations to speak for them; they want to speak for themselves.”

[txlibdem]

1. Could be that people are finally realizing that politicians focus on what's best for politicians

It's just a guess but it seems like a mass awareness has come over the voters of the world: politicians are wealthy a-holes who only give a crap about continuing their own political careers and/or helping other wealthy a-holes... ONLY.