strange bedfellows

Example: “The farmers and the tech firm made strange bedfellows in the campaign.”

Origin: Coined by Shakespeare in The Tempest (1611): shipwrecked and caught in a sudden storm, the jester Trinculo takes shelter under the same cloak as Caliban, a native inhabitant of the island he otherwise regards with open contempt, muttering "misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." The line captures a genuinely uncomfortable truth about hardship: real necessity can force people who would never willingly associate into close, temporary alliance out of pure practical need. Charles Dickens preserved the same proverb almost word for word in The Pickwick Papers (1837), and the phrase has since drifted from its literal image of physically sharing a bed into a general figure, especially common in political writing, for any unexpected, uncomfortable, but circumstantially necessary partnership between otherwise incompatible parties.