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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> So if after an election there are two different coalitions who both claim to be the best chance at a stable government, who makes the choice to go with one of them, or to call fresh elections?

We, here in the rest of the world, use a magic number to determine that. 51% (or 50% + 1).

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Sure, that works fine when one party has 50%. But what happens when no-one does?

That was the case in the UK from 2010-2015. It's called a minority government.

Various factions horse trade until some coalition of parties has a majority, and then they rule as coalition. Members of both the Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats had cabinet seats.

The main downside to this sort of process is that sometimes negotiations take a long time. Belgium spent nearly two years bickering over forming their coalition in 2010.

That comment was literally about coalitions ...

> Sure, that works fine when one party has 50%. But what happens when no-one does?

Form a coalition that does or have new elections. You can even set a timeline after an election for a coalition to be in place or new elections are mandated by law.

Belgium does a great job of proving that that doesn't quite always work.

Belgium was the country that recovered fastest from the 2008 financial crash...

Yet we still pay a "crisisbijdrage" :P It's an additional tax on top of regular corporation tax.

EDIT: which seems to have been introduced in 1993 and never removed :-/

It's a great example of why cancel culture shouldn't be used to run a country.

There are a ton of counterexamples and things in real life are measured by ratios of good to bad, not by proving that one case is false, like in math.

> 51% (or 50% + 1).

Usually “smallest integer greater than 50%”, of which the other two are imperfect approximations.

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