That bit in The Life of Brian, where the People’s Front of Judea resent being mistaken for the Judaean People’s Front: do young viewers get the joke? It was meant as a satire of the left. Socialists in the 1970s were forever splintering into obscure factions or “tendencies”. Watched again now, the scene remains clever. It does not remain entirely relevant.
For fragmentation in 2026, look right. In Poland, the ultra-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) cannot agree whether to become still more hardline or to woo a different sort of voter. The result is an increasingly formal split. Mateusz Morawiecki — the relative moderate in this saga, as much as that spooks western European liberals who remember him as prime minister — leads a grouping within PiS with the reassuringly bland name of Development Plus.