This is pretty much the way politics are conducted in the Netherlands, as well. Check out this blog, by the way. I’m featuring it for a while; see the column on the right.
It’s hard to get excited about elections in a foreign country. You can’t vote. You’re cautious when discussing the candidates because you’re not sure how to pronounce their names. It would take a dramatic change for a new government to affect expats, anyway.
But I learned a lot about the politics of my own homeland while watching the electoral process up close in Norway during the election campaign over the last month. It’s so different from how things works in the U.S.
For one thing, Norway has 7 different political parties giving its 5.1 million people varied representation in parliament.
The Norwegian government is usually made up of three or four parties. You need 85 out of 169 seats in parliament to form a government and a single party never gets that much support. Instead, the parties form coalitions by negotiating a common platform to govern together, with the leader…
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Resident Alien -- Being Dutch in America 