The Wrong Map
What happens when the old political models fall apart
Political maps are built on a useful assumption: where you stand on one question predicts where you’ll stand on others. Left on labour means left on environment. Right on culture means right on trade. Positions have histories, sometimes generational. Coalitions have genealogies.
Strange bedfellows aren’t new in political circles. What’s changed is what these alignments actually are. In conventional coalition politics, groups negotiate shared positions and move together. What we’re now seeing more often is something different: groups sharing a temporary position — the same target, the same moment — then moving off in entirely different directions. They weren’t converging. They were briefly adjacent.
This is what F02 — From Political Spectrum to Ideological Fog describes: the dissolution of stable organizing logics that once made political coalitions legible and predictable. The fog isn’t the coalition. It’s the illusion of one.
Why Now?
Two weeks ago, UK local election results showed Labour losing simultaneously to Reform on its working-class flank and to the Greens in its urban strongholds — losing 1,121 councillors and 28 councils while the Greens won their first elected mayors and Reform took 1,257 seats. The voters who moved right and the voters who moved left drew from the same pool. No standard model of British political geography predicted both movements at once.
This isn’t a UK story only. Every incumbent party facing national elections in a developed country in 2024 declined in vote share — the first time in 120 years of electoral records. Across 24 countries surveyed by Pew in 2025, 42% of adults said no party represented their views well. In the US, a record 45% identified as political independents in 2025 — with both major parties tied at 27%. In Indonesia, party identification collapsed from 86% to below 20% in a single decade.
The map is failing in different places for different reasons.
Forecast Applied
F02 describes what happens when the stable organizing logics that once made political coalitions legible dissolve. It isn’t that left and right have disappeared, but the labels have lost their predictive power — their ability to tell you where someone will land on the next question once you know where they stand on this one.
What’s replacing predictability isn’t a new map, but something less stable: groups arriving at the same position for different reasons, then dispersing. The UK voter who backed Labour in 2024 and Reform or Green in 2026 didn’t change their values. The terrain changed and the available options rearranged.
Referenda often show it most clearly — stripped of party labels, forced to a single question, voters consistently produce results that their partisan alignment wouldn’t have predicted. Brexit was the most visible case. It wasn’t the last.
The same dynamic assembles coalitions at the group level — around specific catalysts (e.g. a planning decision, a court ruling, a collapsed building) that concentrate multiple grievances into one contestable point. In Ireland, Sinn Féin, Labour, and rural communities attacked the government’s data center policy from incompatible directions simultaneously — none coordinating, all temporarily adjacent. In Serbia, liberals, nationalists, and students filled the same streets after a railway station collapsed — holding together only by refusing to resolve their contradictions. The prime minister resigned within three months. Different objects, different countries, different political traditions. Same mechanism.
These coalitions aren’t harbingers of durable realignment, however. Once the immediate contest resolves there is no shared program, no organisation, no platform reconciling why different groups showed up. They are more like skirmish formations. What’s significant is that incoherent, temporary, uncoordinated opposition is proving functionally effective. Fog politics doesn’t require coherence. It requires a catalyst.
Why It Matters
Every major election is now described as a linchpin — the most consequential in a generation. What’s producing that feeling isn’t that the stakes have risen. It’s that the outcomes have become genuinely harder to read, because the organizing logics that made results foreseeable have dissolved. The tools built for spectrum politics — polling models, stakeholder mapping, ideological positioning — were calibrated for a more legible world.
As the Institute for Government noted after the recent results, swathes of local government will now be run by new and inexperienced councillors from insurgent parties — people who’ve never governed, elected because the existing options stopped fitting. This is what fog politics produces when it reaches the ground.
What To Do With This
Stop reading the ideology of the coalition. Instead, examine what catalyst is assembling it and why those particular groups converged there.
Track which catalysts are forming. Referenda are often the earliest signal — they reveal where voters actually stand before parties have processed the shift. Issues concentrating multiple grievances simultaneously — AI infrastructure, technological surveillance, economic disruption, system failures — are the next ones to watch. Map them before the coalition arrives, not after.
Take the impermanence seriously in both directions. Fog coalitions dissolve as fast as they form — which means they can’t be permanently absorbed or defeated. It also means movements relying on proximity-based solidarity rather than shared ideology may struggle to convert wins into durable change.
Don’t wait for the coalition to become legible. By the time it has a name and a leadership, it’s already dissolving.
Where This Goes
What we know about these formations: they will become more common, more contradictory, harder to read — and easier to manipulate. The analytical reflex to locate them on a familiar map — left, right, populist, progressive — will keep producing wrong answers. The groups that were briefly adjacent have already moved on. The decade ahead will require better tools for recognizing what’s actually assembling, and why, before the catalyst disappears and the moment passes.
These coalitions won’t last. The next one is already forming somewhere else, around something none of the people in it would have predicted they’d share.
For those of us whose work depends on reading political direction — what’s forming, what’s dissolving, what’s next — the fog isn’t a metaphor. It’s a methodological problem. The signals are real, but the categories for interpreting them are increasingly not.
One Hard Question
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