Bulgaria will be heading back to the polls next month, only three months after its last general election failed to produce a government.
Israel has just had its fourth general election in two years.
Repeated elections are unpopular but generally seen as democracy’s bottom line.
Trying to restrict them can be counter-productive: the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, about to be repealed, delivered Theresa May’s zombie administration.
Stormont, admittedly not a national parliament, is meant to have repeated elections within a reasonable time until an executive can be formed. This is a legal requirement under the Good Friday Agreement and has been upheld by the courts.
Instead, we have developed an informal and sometimes barely lawful approach of avoiding elections at all costs. When an executive collapses or ceases to function, as in the three-year welfare reform crisis from 2012, the British and Irish governments step in to coax the two largest parties back together with deals, threats and inducements. The agreement itself has been re-jigged for this goal, as happened at St Andrews in 2006.
Going back to the electorate to get a different combination of largest parties has never been considered realistic, given the requirements of power-sharing and the history of entrenched voting patterns in Northern Ireland.
Elections have routinely been described as polarising, arguably a legitimate concern in the early years of devolution. A wearier objection became commonplace after Stormont’s 2017 collapse: another election would change nothing, it was said, because the same parties would be returned in the same ranking to face the same deadlocked issues.
Then the 2019 Alliance surge showed voting patterns were changing. Although the DUP and Sinn Féin remained the largest parties, the mere prospect of losing votes in an assembly election was enough to hurry them back into office.
Now opinion polls have shifted far more dramatically, with Sinn Féin in an apparently unassailable lead and the DUP at real risk of being surpassed by the UUP.
So what is the objection today to a cycle of snap elections?
There is no need to rewrite Stormont’s rules or abandon power-sharing to hope for change at the ballot box. A hammering for the DUP might be enough to chasten it. If it would not serve as ‘deputy’ to Sinn Féin, a further hammering might hand that role to the UUP. Assembly elections take three months to arrange and cost £5 million. We could have two out of the way by Christmas for less than Stormont underspends in a month.
This should become the presumption for resolving every executive collapse. Resistance to elections is ‘ugly scaffolding’ put up around Stormont without any basis in law. Why leave it up one moment longer when it has no justification in practice?
Functioning devolution remains the wish of the overwhelming majority of the public. The change in voting patterns shows people will come out of their trenches to maintain it but the polls need to be open for them to do so.
As the executive faces another crisis, the usual siren calls have been heard of Stormont never returning should it fall again - as if the inability of two particular parties to govern together requires abolishing devolved government itself.
Some unionists imagine an executive collapse would lead to permanent direct rule or UK integration, as UUP leader Doug Beattie has noted, while warning such dreams are a mirage.
Some nationalists think it would lead to joint authority or a border poll, although the first is a fantasy and the second is no nearer with or without devolution.
Darker agendas of chaos lurk on the republican and loyalist fringes. All this is facilitated by the bizarre idea that a Sinn Féin-DUP coalition is somehow sacrosanct.
There is also a moral hazard for the top two parties.
If the British government steps in to resolve the current crisis, as Sinn Féin says it has already offered to do, London will pass Irish language legislation to the DUP’s quiet relief. That solution looks so convenient it must be asked if the crisis has been partially engineered.
Welfare reform was finally resolved by dumping it on Westminster, as was same-sex marriage and abortion. A similar approach to sea border implementation would suit the DUP.
Multiple parties at Stormont might prefer a spell of direct rule to tackle NHS reform.
This is a system that rewards and even encourages crisis. Avoiding elections ultimately causes the very instability it is supposed to prevent.
Why should anyone with faith in democracy believe otherwise?
