People don't vote for a prime minister. They vote for local representatives, the representatives are in parties that negotiate with each other to build a majority and form a government, and the Prime Minister is effectively the person that the representatives agree will lead the government. They don't have presidential powers, they are just a leader of the negotiated government.
I don't think anybody actually wants our elections to be perpetual. I imagine it'd be easy to fix, except for the fact that longer elections cost more and this means the richest have more sway. I bet they'd resist.
That, plus like everything else in America, an entire business has sprung up around running federal elections. Longer campaigns require more staffers, strategists, pollsters, advertisers, etc. It's a billion dollar industry unto itself.
I think the parties and the companies that own them want the elections to be perpetual, to keep us distracted and fighting each other. It also gives the companies a lot more time to bribe donate to candidates.
Honestly, if it wasn't one of the most powerful and influential countries of the world, it would be helluva entertainment. I'd invest in popcorn stocks.
On the other hand, if it wasn't one of the most powerful and influential countries in the world nobody would care.
But honestly though, I wonder how many "liberals" (let alone people who were undecided, even though it's hard to imagine they exist) won't be too happy about a black woman as the candidate
OC might be non native speaker. There is e.g. in German a conjunction (wenn) which is used to indicate both, temporal (when) or conditial meaning (if).
Too short election terms make for a dysfunctional government. With the usual 4-5 years most countries use half of that term is already spent campaigning for the next, forcing the government to do anything unpopular (but often necessary) during the first years, and then tone it down and do popular things else they have no chance of getting re elected.
If you shortened that further the politicians would be forced into a perpetual state of pandering to the voter base instead of actually governing.
On the other hand, those coalition talks can take months or longer with the old government continuing to run things for sometimes over a year after the elections. Looking at you, Belgium
It was genuinely a news item when we won the world record from Iraq for the longest period without government during the 2010-2011 government formation.
It's really not. When we say "no government", what we usually mean is "no new government has been formed out of the elected new Parliament, so the old ministers stay on.
It's not like US government shutdown where everyone literally stops working.