On how fragmentation works as a governance strategy, and why populists always win from it
1. A pizza nobody could eat
On Budget Day 2026, the Dutch minority government led by Prime Minister Rob Jetten presented its first full budget. ABN AMRO, the country’s largest bank, described the result aptly: a pizza of which each coalition party received a number of slices. D66 had its slices, the VVD its slices, the CDA its slices. Together, those three parties hold 66 seats in the lower house of parliament. A majority requires 76.
The pizza was already cut before the other guests arrived at the table.
What followed was a budget that had to call itself “a budget in search of a majority,” a phrase not normally associated with governmental confidence. The cabinet now needs to find support either from PRO, the progressive left alliance, which demands fewer spending cuts, or from right-wing parties, which demand fewer expenditures altogether. Those two directions rule each other out. The pizza has gone cold.
This is not a critique of this particular cabinet. It is an illustration of a mechanism. And that mechanism is the subject of this essay.
2. Fragmentation is not an accident
Our political systems are designed to keep problems separate. Not out of malice, but by structure.
Consider how a government is organised: ministries have their own budgets, their own policy responsibilities, their own parliamentary committees, their own lobby networks, and their own authority to define what counts as a problem and what does not. Housing covers housing. Agriculture covers farming. Environment covers the environment. Public health covers health. Finance covers money.
But the great challenges of our time do not respect those boundaries. The PFAS contamination around the Chemours plant in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, is simultaneously an environmental problem, a public health problem, a legal problem, a spatial planning problem, and a governance problem. Each department recognises its piece, takes responsibility for its piece, and can pass the rest along. The problem falls precisely between the cracks. That is not bad luck, that is the architecture.
The same applies to the nitrogen crisis, the housing shortage, the energy transition, the cost of living. Problems that exist across multiple domains at once, and that are therefore never fully resolved in any single domain. Government produces policy papers by domain. Society experiences the problems as one vast, unsolvable mess.
3. The political advantage of the simple culprit
This is where it gets interesting, and uncomfortable.
While the political centre produces ten separate solutions to ten separate problems, the populist right offers one coherent culprit for all ten at once. September 2026 made this visible in Germany in a way that is hard to ignore. On 6 September, the AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the best result ever achieved by any party in a German state election since reunification, and just short of an outright majority. Two weeks later, on 20 September, the AfD also came first in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 38.2 percent. The CDU failed to clear the 5 percent threshold and was voted out of the state parliament entirely, the first time this had happened anywhere in Germany. The SPD of incumbent minister-president Manuela Schwesig scraped second place with 35.5 percent, and will likely need to form a coalition with Die Linke and the Greens to keep the AfD out of government. Four parties needed for a majority. The AfD has one message.
But the result of that same evening in Berlin is at least as telling. There it was not the far-right AfD that won, but Die Linke, the far left, with 25.7 percent, the first time the party had topped a poll in the capital since reunification. Their campaign was not about immigration but about housing: the affordability of the city, rents, the displacement of lower-income residents from their neighbourhoods. One problem, one narrative, a historic victory.
The pattern is now complete: the political centre is not only losing to the right. It is losing to any party that names one coherent problem and points to a recognisable culprit. The AfD wins on immigration. Die Linke wins on housing. Both reduce complexity to a single story. The centre offers ten separate answers to ten separate questions, and loses on both flanks at once.
Those looking to France in the coming months will see the next stage. Marine Le Pen is polling between 33 and 38 percent for the first round of the presidential election in April 2027, virtually certain to enter the run-off. Her most likely opponent is not a centrist candidate but Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical-left France Insoumise, who finishes second in several polling scenarios. Macron, according to Reuters, leaves behind “a hollowed-out political centre and a weakened economy.” Seven in ten French voters want “real change.” That is not rhetoric, that is a diagnosis of what happens to the centre when it structurally fails to connect the problems it is supposed to solve.
Political systems designed for the postwar era are cracking under the pressure of 21st-century populism, political scientists said after Thuringia in 2024. That is true, but incomplete. These systems are not cracking despite fragmentation. They are cracking because of it. Populism is not the cause of the problem. It is the symptom that reveals where the system fails.
4. The reverse experiment
But look at what happens when you flip fragmentation around.
In the first essay of this series, an example came up worth repeating: rising oil prices make investments in renewable energy simultaneously a measure against energy poverty and a contribution to geopolitical autonomy. Four problems, climate, affordability, energy security, geopolitical dependence, become one shared challenge. The solution is greater than the sum of its parts, and so is the coalition that supports it.
This is not a rhetorical trick. It is systems thinking as a political instrument.
The housing crisis and the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands are treated as two separate and almost adversarial policy files. Farmers versus city dwellers, nature versus construction. But whoever connects them sees something else: the Netherlands has outdated land use, rigid ownership structures, and a spatial planning system that has failed for decades to make structural choices. Nitrogen emissions are partly a symptom of an agricultural model that has locked itself into ever-greater scale and export dependency. The housing crisis is partly a symptom of that same rigidity in land policy. Both problems share the same structural root cause, and can therefore carry the same structural solution.
That demands something from politics: the courage to define a problem as larger than the policy domain responsible for it. And that is precisely what our political systems structurally do not reward. Because whoever makes a problem bigger also makes their own responsibility bigger, and their own potential failures more visible.
5. Why the centre keeps losing
The pizza budget is the perfect example of what goes wrong when you do try to work together, but still think in separate pieces. Three parties with three different electorates, three sets of election promises, three lists of priorities. The negotiating technique is: everyone gets their slice. The result is a document that belongs to nobody and convinces nobody.
Meanwhile the cabinet asks for support from parties that want the opposite of what those same parties have already promised their own voters. It is political square-circle drawing, and citizens can see it.
The fundamental problem is not that this cabinet negotiates badly. It is that the political grammar within which the negotiating happens, each party its own domain, each party its own slice, each party its own electorate, structurally prevents problems from being connected. The pizza metaphor accidentally reveals the true nature of the problem: coalition-building is treated as distribution, not as composition.
A budget as composition would start with the question: what are the two or three great challenges we now face, and how do they connect? Affordability, climate, geopolitical vulnerability, and the thread running between them. Only then comes: who does what, and how do we pay for it? That is a fundamentally different sequence from: who gets which slice, and how do we keep all three of our party bases satisfied?
6. Coherence as a narrative
The centre is not losing because it has the wrong solutions. It is losing because it has no story that connects the problems.
Populists offer a false but coherent narrative: there is an enemy, there is a golden past, there is a simple solution. That story resonates not because people are foolish, but because coherence itself is a human need. People do not experience their lives in policy domains. They experience: the rent I can no longer afford, the air I breathe, the job that feels precarious, the school that is letting my children down.
The political power of systems thinking is not that it is academically correct. It is that it recognises that experience. That it says: you are right that these things are connected. And here is why, and here is what that means for what we need to do.
That is a different kind of story from the policy paper. It is also a different kind of story from the politics of scapegoating. It is the story the centre could tell, if it were willing to free itself from the pizza.
This essay is the third in a series. The previous contributions, “Other Paths Were Possible” and “The Past as a Weapon,” appeared earlier on luxzen.eu. The next essay examines historical examples of organising differently: proof that it has always been possible to do things another way.