Take a step back and consider how hardened the divide is between “the two sides”. It should have never come that far, how are you gonna keep national unity in a situation like that!? Are there other first world countries that are that divided?
The US voting system is probably fairly unhelpful, here. Most democratic countries have _multiple_ sides, and need to form coalitions; compromise is, of necessity, more of a thing. For instance, the next government in Germany will likely be a centre-right/centre-left coalition.
It's the root of the problem imo. However, with the majority of the population on a middle school reading comprehension level, it's impossible to explain.
To add: Beyond the need for compromise, a multi-party democracy also provides a safety valve; if a fringe element of a major party grows _too_ fringe, it will often just break off (in the last 20 years Ireland has had _two_ new minor parties emerge from an anti-abortion/anti-LGBT fringe breaking with a major party, say). In two party systems, you instead tend to get ‘big tent’ parties, with the fringe elements on the inside, and sometimes one of the fringe element takes over. For instance, see the US Republicans with Trumpism, the UK Conservatives with Brexiteers (and later an attempted, though largely failed, takeover by Truss’s lot, and, er, whatever the hell they’re doing now, who even knows anymore), and arguably UK Labour with Corbyn’s faction (again, this didn’t really last).
(The UK’s a bit of an oddity here in that it’s _kind_ of a multiparty state for historical reasons, but doesn’t really have the right type of electoral system to support a multiparty system.)
Disenfranchised, easily manipulated voters that want to tear down the system on one side, and people whose convictions are still somewhat based in reality on the other.
That would not be a split in halves, by any means, though. East Germany accounts for about 15% of the population, last I looked. Also, the far-right AfD got about 20% of the votes in the recent election. That is also not a split in halves.
Why squabble at semantics here fixating on exactly half? 1/5th of modern Germany voting for the modern incarnation of the nazi party is a disgrace and speaks to the propaganda situation their population faces.
You can see for yourself: https://bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswahlen/2025/ergebnis...
This shows the winners of the "second vote."
Dark blue = CSU (conservative party), its outlines are identical to Bavaria because this party only runs there and, this time around, won 100% of the second votes.
Cyan = AfD, far right-wing party. Its outlines are nearly identical to the borders of the former GDR.
Gray = CDU, CSU's sister party, making up for most of the remainder.
Increasingly so most western countries are getting fractures by the Russian and Chinese propaganda apparatus. Ask any rural/working class western european these days and whatever rhetoric they are primed to regurgitate to you is not dissimilar to what you’d get from a similar american: people who aren’t white are destroying the country they claim, they claim they should be more insular and less tied to the global stage, and they are trusting charlatans who speak to these bigoted positions without ever actually reading their policy positions that solely benefit the oligarch class in that country.
