Last week I wrote that France’s old party system had largely disappeared even though its constitution and electoral institutions remained intact. This week, another European election has produced an even more striking example of how quickly political competition can reorganise itself.
Slovenia voted last Sunday, and Prime Minister Janez Janša’s government lost decisively. The winner was Robert Golob, a former energy executive whose liberal Freedom Movement won roughly a third of the vote and 41 seats in Slovenia’s 90-member parliament. Janša’s Slovenian Democratic Party finished well behind with 27 seats.
The extraordinary part is not simply that an incumbent government lost an election. Democracies are supposed to do that.
It is that the party replacing it barely existed in its current form a few months ago.
Golob entered national electoral politics only recently after leaving the state-owned energy company GEN-I. He took control of a small green party, transformed it into the Freedom Movement and built a campaign around liberal democracy, environmental policy, institutional reform and opposition to Janša’s governing style. Months later, it has become comfortably the largest party in parliament.
There is something remarkably democratic about that.
There is also something potentially unstable about it.
For most of the twentieth century, political parties were substantial social institutions. They possessed local organisations, ideological traditions, memberships, youth wings, relationships with trade unions, churches or business organisations, and networks connecting ordinary citizens with national government. A politician generally rose through those structures before becoming capable of competing for executive power.
Modern politics increasingly allows the sequence to operate backwards.
First comes the leader.
Then the movement.
Then, if the election goes well, perhaps the institution.
Macron’s rise in France demonstrated something similar in 2017. Volodymyr Zelensky’s rise in Ukraine came through a political party constructed around a television celebrity who had never previously held political office. Italy’s Five Star Movement grew rapidly outside the traditional party structure. Across democracies, political entrepreneurs can now construct national movements far more quickly than older political organisations could.
Technology helps explain part of this. Television and social media allow politicians to communicate directly with millions of voters without relying as heavily on local party organisations. Campaign databases allow new movements to identify supporters rapidly. Online fundraising can replace some traditional membership structures. Political brands can be built nationally in months.
This reduces the barriers to political entry.
That is potentially very good for democracy.
If established parties stop representing voters effectively, citizens need alternatives. A political system in which two or three old parties control access to power indefinitely can become cartel-like. Party organisations begin protecting themselves rather than representing changing public preferences. New ideas struggle to enter because institutional gatekeepers control nominations, funding and media attention.
Political start-ups create competition.
And competition can discipline political institutions just as it disciplines markets.
If an established party knows dissatisfied voters have nowhere else to go, it has weaker incentives to adapt. If a new movement can appear and take a third of the electorate within months, complacency becomes much more expensive.
Slovenian voters have just demonstrated that threat very clearly.
Janša is one of Slovenia’s most experienced politicians and has served several terms as prime minister. His supporters view him as a strong conservative leader who defended Slovenian interests and pursued policies they considered necessary during the pandemic and other crises.
His opponents increasingly accused him of weakening democratic norms, attacking journalists and moving Slovenia politically closer to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Janša rejected accusations that his government was authoritarian, but concerns about media freedom, institutional independence and political polarisation became central to the election.
Golob therefore offered something powerful: not simply a different policy programme but a political reset.
That word—reset—has enormous electoral value when citizens become dissatisfied with established institutions.
A new political movement can claim innocence.
It did not create yesterday’s problems because it did not exist yesterday.
It has no twenty-year voting record for opponents to attack.
It can promise competence without having governed.
It can attract voters from different ideological backgrounds because its identity has not yet hardened around every controversial issue.
This is the political equivalent of a new company entering a market without legacy costs.
But eventually the advantage disappears.
The new party becomes the government.
Then it has to make decisions.
Decisions create losers.
Budgets create priorities.
Appointments create disappointed candidates.
Coalitions require compromise.
Policies fail.
Scandals occur.
The political start-up acquires a record.
That is when we discover whether the movement was actually an institution or simply an electoral vehicle.
This distinction matters because democracies need more than mechanisms for expressing dissatisfaction. They need organisations capable of governing after dissatisfaction wins.
Winning an election requires constructing a coalition of voters.
Governing requires constructing a coalition of interests capable of surviving decisions.
Those are different skills.
A campaign can unite environmentalists, economic liberals, anti-Janša voters, younger voters and people simply exhausted by political polarisation. Once in government, those groups may disagree sharply over taxation, welfare, energy, healthcare or labour policy.
The broadness that makes a new movement electorally successful can therefore become a weakness after victory.
Established parties often appear frustrating precisely because decades of internal argument have already forced them to develop procedures for resolving these disagreements.
Party conferences, committees, leadership elections and ideological factions can look bureaucratic.
They are.
But bureaucracy can preserve organisations when personalities change.
A party that exists principally because voters trust one leader has a different problem.
What happens when that leader becomes unpopular?
This is where political personalisation becomes dangerous.
A charismatic leader can bypass weak institutions and assemble support rapidly. But the resulting movement may depend heavily on that individual’s reputation.
If the leader fails, the party can collapse with them.
That creates electoral volatility.
One election produces a new movement.
The movement disappoints.
Another new movement replaces it.
Citizens remain politically engaged, but institutions never accumulate enough trust or experience to become durable.
Italy has experienced versions of this pattern repeatedly. Slovenia itself has seen several new centrist or liberal parties emerge rapidly around individual leaders during the last decade.
That suggests Golob’s victory is not simply an isolated political surprise. It may reflect a structural weakness in the Slovenian party system: voters remain willing to support liberal or centrist politics but repeatedly search for new organisations through which to express that preference.
That is different from ideological instability.
Voters may be relatively stable in what they want while being extremely unstable in whom they trust to provide it.
This distinction matters.
Election volatility is often interpreted as voters constantly changing ideology.
Sometimes they are changing agents, not preferences.
Imagine hiring someone to manage your money. You may keep the same investment objective while replacing the manager repeatedly because each manager disappoints you.
The objective remains stable.
Trust does not.
Politics can work similarly.
Slovenian voters may broadly favour European integration, democratic institutions, environmental policy and a moderate political direction while repeatedly concluding that the particular party currently representing those preferences has failed.
A new movement then enters and inherits the electorate.
That creates what might be called a low-trust equilibrium.
Voters continue participating democratically, but attachment to political organisations becomes shallow.
This can improve accountability because parties cannot rely on permanent loyalty.
It can also make long-term policymaking more difficult because every government knows its electoral coalition may disappear quickly.
Structural reforms often impose costs today for benefits arriving years later. Pension reform, healthcare restructuring, energy transition and infrastructure investment all require political patience.
If parties expect to survive only one electoral cycle, they have stronger incentives to prioritise immediate popularity.
Institutional instability can therefore shorten political time horizons.
This is one reason durable parties have value even when voters dislike them.
They allow politicians to think beyond one leader and sometimes beyond one election.
Of course, durability can become stagnation.
The trade-off appears again.
Too much party loyalty allows organisations to become complacent.
Too little party loyalty prevents organisations from becoming institutions.
Democracy needs enough competition to punish failure and enough continuity to make governing possible.
There is no obvious optimal point.
Slovenia’s election also raises an important question about political polarisation. Janša’s political style has often been compared with Viktor Orbán and, in some respects, Donald Trump. He uses social media aggressively, attacks critics and presents politics as conflict between competing visions of the nation.
Golob campaigned partly on reducing that polarisation.
But anti-polarisation politics contains its own paradox.
A movement can unite people by opposing divisiveness.
To do so, it needs somebody to identify as responsible for the division.
The campaign against polarisation can therefore become another polarising coalition.
This is why calls for political unity are often less neutral than they sound. Unity usually means unity around a particular set of institutions, values or policies.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
It simply means the alternative to polarisation is not everybody suddenly agreeing.
It is constructing disagreements that remain bounded enough that political opponents continue recognising one another as legitimate.
That is a much more realistic objective.
Democratic politics will always contain conflict because citizens genuinely want different things.
The question is whether losing an election means waiting for another opportunity or believing the country has been stolen by enemies.
By that standard, Slovenia’s election is encouraging.
An incumbent government faced substantial criticism.
A new opposition movement organised rapidly.
Voters removed the government through an election.
The political system changed direction without constitutional crisis.
That is democratic responsiveness operating remarkably quickly.
Yet the scale of Golob’s victory also gives him a responsibility that new political movements sometimes underestimate.
Being elected because voters want change does not mean voters agree on what the change should be.
A protest mandate is not automatically a policy mandate.
Golob will need coalition partners because 41 seats are not enough for a majority in the 90-seat parliament. That means negotiation with established political organisations will begin almost immediately.
The outsider will have to work through the institutions he campaigned to change.
That is probably healthy.
Coalition government can force a new movement to translate broad promises into concrete compromises.
The process will frustrate supporters who expected rapid transformation.
But compromise is how diverse electoral preferences become governing policy.
The more interesting test will come when Golob has to make decisions his own voters dislike.
Will the Freedom Movement develop internal mechanisms capable of managing disagreement?
Will it remain coherent if Golob’s popularity falls?
Will local party organisations develop?
Will new political leaders emerge beneath him?
Will the movement survive eventually losing an election?
Those questions determine whether this week’s winner becomes a political institution.
Winning is only the first test.
Losing may ultimately be more important.
A durable democratic party needs to survive both.
There is also a European dimension. Slovenia is a small country of roughly two million people, so its election will not reshape the European Union by itself. But the contest forms part of a larger debate over liberal democracy inside the EU.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won another large electoral victory earlier this month. Poland remains in conflict with Brussels over judicial independence. Marine Le Pen reached 41.45% in France’s presidential runoff. Political movements sceptical of liberal institutions or deeper European integration remain powerful across the continent.
Golob’s victory points in the opposite direction.
European politics is therefore not moving uniformly towards nationalism or liberalism.
Different electorates are responding differently to similar pressures.
Inflation.
Migration.
COVID.
Distrust of institutions.
Cultural change.
Economic insecurity.
The same structural pressures can produce Orbán in Hungary, Macron in France and Golob in Slovenia.
Institutions and political entrepreneurs mediate the response.
That should make us cautious about sweeping claims that “Europe is moving right” or “Europe has rejected populism”.
Europe is not one electorate.
National politics still matters enormously.
This is another limitation of analysing politics only at the level of ideological trends. Voters do not encounter “European populism” in a polling booth.
They encounter particular politicians, scandals, economic conditions and institutional histories.
Macro trends matter.
Local mechanisms determine how those trends become votes.
Slovenia’s election is therefore interesting precisely because it looks simultaneously familiar and unusual.
Familiar because another European incumbent has faced voter dissatisfaction.
Unusual because the organisation replacing him was constructed with extraordinary speed.
That may increasingly become normal.
Political technology has reduced the cost of creating movements.
Trust in established parties has weakened.
Voters are less loyal.
Charismatic or credible outsiders can therefore enter political markets rapidly.
The democratic benefit is obvious: political elites become easier to replace.
The institutional cost is less visible: parties themselves may become disposable.
Perhaps the question for twenty-first-century democracy is therefore no longer only how to make political institutions responsive enough that citizens can replace leaders.
It is how to preserve enough institutional continuity that every replacement does not require rebuilding the political system from the beginning.
Slovenia’s voters wanted change.
They achieved it through an election, peacefully and decisively.
That is democratic success.
Whether the Freedom Movement becomes another temporary vehicle or the beginning of a durable political organisation will take years to determine.
For now, the most interesting fact is that a party can go from political obscurity to governing contender in a matter of months.
Democracy has become extraordinarily good at creating new winners.
The harder task may be creating institutions that survive them.
