I just read an article on that.  It's crazy though not completely unheard of.  Single issue parties can be killer if run by the right people... in a lot of ways they can be more influential then a multifaceted "third party" because they have more to bargin with, as both sides have to rush to try and capture those votes.

That's not true - several countries have been governed very effectively through coalitions for a while now. Germany, Finland and New Zealand are all examples.

It's only when you get awkward coalitions that make no sense on paper (eg. Lib Dems and the Conservatives in the UK) that things don't work.

I think this article probably sums up your worries well.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2012/04/11/econimically-inept-france-crawls-toward-an-election-disaster/

We currently have a coalition government in Norway that isn't working out too well. The socialistic side are in control with a three-party coalition, but one party is by far the largest. You have our version of Labour, one party a few nothces more socialist than that and one party for the farmers and district people. The Labour's company got roughly 35% of the total votes in 2009, while the other ones both got 6-7%.

Effectively, this has caused the situation to be that Labour's controls most stuff, while the two smaller ones control their voters special interests. Whihc, essentially, has resulted in the two smaller ones both directly and indirectly giving more money to their voters than everybody else. This has spurred a wave of corruption scandals in the Norwegian government, and the leader of the most social party had to leave due to corruption.

There's always been a resentment in Norway for coalition governments, and it's only been strengthened by the horrible stuff this government has done. I really have no idea why there's a resentment for coalition governments in Norway, though. The last time we had a government that wasn't a coalition was in 1961, so we've had nothing but coalition governments for over 50 years now.

Please export them. We have one vaguely respectable party in the form of UKIP, and that has a very small niche.

Precisely. My view on coalition governments comes from domestic policies and mistakes.

Rath; I know that they can work, but they often don't. The Norwegian government is a perfect example, it is comprised of two parties with socialist roots with one being near fanatic about environment and having no clue how the real world works, one that used to be fairly left wing but which has turned more and more right and a third that houses a lot of people with interests and engagements in rural regions.

Ap (labor party) are pro-centralization and boring for oil basically everywhere and care little for infrastructure.

Sv (socialist left party) are against boring for oil basically everywhere, have no mind for infrastructure and want schools to be extensions of kindergarden with little to no focus on individual skills and performance and any form for competition.

Sp (central party) are neither for nor against boring for oil but want fishing and agriculture to once again become primary industries and main focus, the are against centralization and involved in infrastructure.

Put simply, the above doesn't work. There are other differences as well and one trait that especially AP and SV share is that they want a vast part of the population employed within the public sector and within management and administration and in supervisor functions, basically creating nothing of value. Norway has an administration fit for running a country the size of Germany which houses about 16-17 times as many people... And there is, of course, no contingency plan for when we run out of oil.

While coalitions may not be working out for you they work out for other countries, it sounds like your coalition is one of those that clearly wasn't going to work out very well that I was talking about.

You're from the UK? You already have a Pirate Party: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/

But the election-system in the UK differs significantly from the one in germany. Even if a smaller party can secure 13% as the PP in germany does, it doesn't mean they can get a single seat in the parliament if election is hold by plurality voting system. We in germany have Proportional representation (with many speialities), that means if the PP has 13% of votes, they get 13% of seats in the parliament.

There is already a Pirate Party in the UK, and I'm quite thankful that its getting trashed in the elections. I don't think they realise the implications would of ever implementing their single policy. Regardless of whether you believe online file-sharing should be legal or not, if it ever became legal everyone would then switch to downloading it all for free. The corporations would then fret over their collapsing revenue (even if it doesn't fall that significantly, they will still want to maintain their levels of profit) and annouce major layoffs and potentially even scrap artists. Considering how many people they employ, the wider economic implications could be horrific.

We do, but nobody has heard of it and nobody votes for it.

There are certainly advantages to proportional representation, like the increased representation of smaller parties, but the main drawback is that every government is a coalition and therefore unstable, and reneging on promises becomes the norm.