Read it. Or as much as you can stand.
This is the important part:
The government crisis in Spain has been going on for than a year. Pedro Sánchez became the head of a minority government in June 2018 after the Spanish parliament passed a motion of no confidence in the right-wing government of former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. Sánchez, who is the secretary-general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), was able to secure victory thanks to support from the left-wing populist party Podemos, as well as Basque and Catalan separatists. This ill-matched group was unable to operate for long without a common enemy, however, and the eight parties proved incapable of negotiating the day-to-day issues involved in running a country.
This is the fundamental flaw with ‘proportional representation’. Every little collection of political quirks has its own ‘party’, because only parties are represented, and every one of them has a flyspeck of representation in the legislature; there is no one set of policies that can command majority support, and therefore a governmental system that depends on their being such a majority is crippled.
The only place where a parliamentary system has ever worked decently is Britain, because Britain was trained by several centuries of ‘court vs country’ combat to think in terms of there being two (and only two) sides to every political issue, which is what makes the system work — and, even now, that has been breaking down as British political culture gets corrupted by mainland European notions.
The American system has a built-in safeguard against this sort of deadlock in the form of Americans voting for an individual candidate rather than a political position in the form of a party — sure, party labels are significant and party feeling gets intense but what is actually elected is an individual whose political positions may or may not line up with somebody else in the government. This is how you get Republicans like John McCain and Rand Paul and Democrats like Scoop Jackson and Sam Nunn and Joe Liberman. If there were a plot of members of Congress by political position it would be a spectrum from far-right to far-left, much as in a European parliament, but at some point it would still be divided into two ‘sides’, and only two sides. Government functions that depend on their being only two formal sides to policy questions can therefore function, however complicated things might get concerning actual policies and legislation.
Even when minor ‘parties’ and ‘independents’ make it into a legislature, they still have to line up with one of the official ‘sides’ if they’re going to avoid being ignored. There has never been a time when a ‘third party’ has held the balance of power between the two official ‘sides’ as perennially happens in non-American governments. There is no chance of a ‘minor party’ being given a cabinet position in order to bring them aboard a ‘coalition’, as commonly happens in a non-American government, because the executive is always in the hands of a single side and, more importantly, in the hands of a single person. The centralization of effective power in the hands of the British Prime Minister over the last hundred years is a reflection of the need for such a focus for executive direction. The traditional practice of individual cabinet officials determining policy in their areas of responsibility, which characterized British governmental methodology through the end of the 19th century, couldn’t survive the pressures of modern political life.
