Coincidence Does Not Exist

Coincidence Does Not Exist

29 October 2025

Yesterday, I wrote a piece titled 13. It was about the one-party government that now holds an absolute majority—13 out of 21 seats in Parliament. And then today, while cleaning a shelf in my library, I stumbled upon a book I hadn’t seen in years: Kiesstelsels en hun consequenties: Op zoek naar een alternatief kiesstelsel voor Curaçao (“Electoral Systems and Their Consequences: In Search of an Alternative Electoral System for Curaçao”), written by O.A. Castilio in 1994. That’s more than 30 years ago.

At the time, I was still a young political scientist, though I presented myself primarily as a governance scholar. The book belonged to the collection of holy scriptures of Kousa Komun, an activist group that advocated for a better electoral system and, more generally, good governance in Curaçao. The organization has been dormant for about ten years now.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the prevailing narrative was that coalition governments were to blame for poor governance. The proposed solution was a two-round election system that would guarantee a single party a majority, allowing it to govern for four years without internal coalition tensions. The reasoning was simple: with one party in power, there would be no bickering between coalition partners, and after four years, voters could hold that party accountable for its performance.

I always argued that this reasoning minimized the strengths of coalition systems and exaggerated the supposed virtues of one-party rule. What is happening now—one party governing alone—is therefore an interesting empirical experiment.

What we are seeing, however, is that the much-praised “stability” is relative. It tends instead to produce opacity —a lack of transparency — caused by the absence of checks and balances—particularly the counterweight of a strong opposition and the internal balancing that coalition partners provide.

Let us hope the conclusions of this experiment will be clear. Yet I have my doubts. There will always be non-political scientists, mostly, who insist that coalitions are the problem and that a one-party government is better.

So maybe the experiment isn’t about one-party rule after all—it’s about us, and whether we are mature enough for democracy.

Miguel Goede