Why do conservatives get to have two parties?

@Elessar "democratically" is doing alot of heavy lifting here

@NoahB In a similar situation someone would simply come up with a new party and the old ones would be forced to restructure/split/reorganize. That's essentially what happened in 2013 over here, in the end the new party that even started well turned into nuts too, but at least people gave politics a signal and politics had to adapt.

We're currently struggling with out viper pits of fascists too (because you know, things like that are internationally coordinated, they operate the same over here with bots and propaganda machines, and receiving foreign fundings as well), but luckily at least for now, they're the opposition and not in the majority coalition.

@Elessar r u referring to the ukip party?

@NoahB No, the "M5S" one here in Italy. It's turned more and more populist/nuts over the years as well, but at first it started as a rational alternative to the old right and left coalitions, forcing them to reorganize. Had we had a first past the post system we'd still be dealing with Berlusconi, probably.

@Elessar oh! Very interesting I just assumed you were from the UK. Seems like everyone on here is. Very interesting. I had heard that Italy had a more clarity when it came to their parties. In America is really muddy. Our parties blend into each other a lot more. Or so I’m told at least

@NoahB We tend to have multiple but smaller parties over here, each representing a smaller subset of the political spectrum (e.g. Berlusconi "FI" party self labels as centre-right, whereas "Lega" is more like our alt-right, and "FDI" more at right than even the alt-right). In general no single party can govern alone, and so you always have a coalition, depending on the components it's more or less a situation of compromises and if a party tries to dominate over the other, in general it ends with the dissolution of the coalition and the formation of a new majority.

Which is more or less what happened last year: the alt-right (Lega) was trending on polls, the leader attempted a govt crisis last summer by taking his party off the majority coalition on purpose, with the intention of triggering anticipated elections, but eventually just kicked himself to the opposition as the other party (M5S) formed a new majority with the left (that also was on par with the other two, in terms of votes received in the last elections). Which made the ass of a lot of right-wingers itch, but is perfectly compliant with our Constitution.

And I'd say thankfully, considering how the "alt-right" seems to be dealing with the pandemic worldwide.