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Notes -
This is not how it works in practice in multi-party parliamentary democracy:
There are long-standing political norms of giving opposition posts related to control of power. They are lead various oversight or budget comitees, there are constitutional provisions where substantial minority of MP can start procedures such as compel investigations, summon ministers to explain stuff etc. There is considerable power given to opposition - doing away with it is exactly in line with what is usually called as tyranny and Trumpian norm-breaking. This is BTW already happening, which creates interesting and dangerous precedent including constitutional court rulings etc.
Voting is nowhere near unanimous. MPs travel, they get sick. Many laws come not from EU and not from state government, there are procedures of how to introduce votes for amendments to laws etc. In practice, many laws require much more than just agreement inside coalition.
In practice such a rainbow coalition is hell to manage - you have to have coalition of greens (Die Grünen), literal commies (Die Linke), pro-business libertarian party (FDP) as well as Christian democrats (CDU/CSU). It is vastly different from US, where each House Member or Senator has to have 50%+ votes. In Europe the most radical lunatics can get 5% and get into parliament. They are structurally not dependent on some governing body like DNC or RNC, they are dependent on their own donors and voters.
If you construct such a coalition, they have hardly any overlap, they have vastly different opinions on things like budget, taxes, regulation and literally everything. It is impossible to present a program that would not cross some red line of some party. So even if they are disciplined, they don't get anything done and it increases power of opposition. If they get together and get something done, it then crosses red line of some party thus angering the party base and voters. It is lose lose situation.
The Brandmauer (German version of the "cordon sanitaire") says the AfD does not get the benefit of this. Which makes the system basically as if the AfD is one party and the other parties are all simply factions of another party.
It is much worse than age old Christian Democrats vs Social Democrats duopoly, in which the losing party would hold these positions to control power. It was designed to give the government legitimacy, to appease to voters voting for losing party so they viewed the system as legitimate and at least somewhat under control, it fostered participation at least in this form of oversight.
The current Brandmauer system is banana republic "winner takes all" democracy. It is much more dangerous than just simple duopoly, even more dangerous than what is now seen in US.
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