[corty]

The election is also far less influential, because there will always be a coalition in power, where sometimes single-seat differences (often resulting from weird specialties of the election system like Ueberhangmandate and Ausgleichsmandate) decide on the (non-)viability of some option.

And all the election programme of a party is very much up for discussion in coalition talks: A famous example of a coalition compromise: 2005 SPD promised "leave VAT at 16%", CDU promised "VAT raise to 18%". Their compromise? raise VAT to 19%.

The election is the boring part, the talks right after the election decide what will happen.

[hackeraccount]

My favorite example of that is from 1909; Churchill describing the number of battleships to be built.

“The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”

[majewsky]

We had a famous case of this in the German federal election of 2005. The conservatives (CDU/CSU) wanted to increase sales tax by 1%, the social democrats (SPD) were opposed to increasing it at all. They ended up forming a coalition that raised the sales tax by 3%.