The substantial fragmentation of the vote since then has imposed a ceiling on the share of the total vote a party in government can expect to win.
The left is still obsessed with what happened in April 2002, when a fragmentation of the votes led to the elimination of Lionel Jospin in the first round.
Simon Hix, European politics professor at the London School of Economics, said: "What's happening all across Europe is a decline of mainstream political parties, a fragmentation of the vote on the centre left and the centre right.
The parliamentary elections were the first time Greece's foreign loan agreement had been put to a democratic test, and the outcome was clear: a rejection of the terms of the bailout and a fragmentation of the vote so severe that the two more established parties were scrambling to form alliances in a hung Parliament.
Containing that restlessness, and holding out the hope of a better future, will be a challenge for a political class that needs to restore its credibility and to curb a damaging fragmentation of the mainstream vote ahead of the presidential contest in 2007.Sophie Pedder: France correspondent, The Economist.
The fragmentation of the Liberal Democrat protest vote has nurtured the Greens and nationalist parties: Plaid Cymru, Ukip (a reactionary English movement in spite of its unionist name) and, most conspicuously, the SNP.
Popular demand for PR won't go away after a No vote; the present fragmentation of support for the major political parties will not end simply because of a No vote.
He said that in Sunday's vote the party benefited from the fragmentation of the centre-left, which split into The River (To Potami), socialist Pasok and George Papandreou's Movement of Democratic Socialists (Kinima).
This extreme fragmentation means that the number of votes for Wilders's party will ultimately have little impact on future coalition discussions for the formation of a new government.
The simultaneous merging and fragmentation of Israeli society are visible in the way people say they plan to vote.Introverts anonymousMr Olmert now calls it not hitnatkut, "disengagement", but hitkansut, or going-into-oneself, often rendered as "convergence".
