Long
goodbye of the European Left
Across
the Continent, socialists are failing to capitalize on political
opportunities.
By PIERRE BRIANÇON
3/29/16, 5:30 AM CET
PARIS — The
European Left often looks divided into two camps: One loses
elections, the other doesn’t seem interested in winning them.
After eight years of
economic crisis, austerity policies and, more recently, European
angst about refugees and immigrants, traditional leftist parties,
which dominated Europe 15 years ago, can’t seem to capitalize on
conservative governments’ woes or electoral setbacks.
You only had to look
at the gloomy faces and meager pronouncements of Europe’s
center-left leaders who gathered in Paris earlier this month for a
summit hosted by French President François Hollande to get an idea
of their current funk.
Gone were references
to “socialism” in a meeting that was billed rather as one of
“social-democratic leaders” — whether government or party
heads. From Hollande’s curt statement after the meeting — in
which he offered no “social democratic” solutions to the refugee
crisis or even on human rights in Turkey — it was easy to see that
on Europe’s most pressing problems, leaders of the traditional Left
don’t have much to offer that would distinguish them from
conservatives.
“It’s hard to
come up with common ideas on today’s major issues when everyone is
retreating back along the lines of national interests, at least as
they understand them,” said a Hollande aide in defense of the lack
of serious pan-European center-left common ground, whether on the
economy, the refugee crisis or even on strategic matters such as the
attitude towards Russia.
The
Left is paying dearly for the years it was in power, which voters
don’t remember fondly
The Left is dealing
with threats both from the inside, with the rise of movements
advocating radical economic or social changes, and the outside, as
its traditional voters are increasingly being poached by populist
far-right movements such as France’s National Front and Germany’s
AfD.
“Throughout
Europe, the social democrats have lost their natural engine, which
had long been the trade union movement. So they lost a major way to
connect with the population at large, and haven’t replaced it with
anything,” said André Gattolin, a former pollster who is now a
French senator for the Green party. “Just playing public opinion
and media instead of voters doesn’t cut it.”
‘They’re all the
same’
The Left is paying
dearly for the years it was in power, which voters don’t remember
fondly. Since the 2008 crisis, the Left has been associated with
disappointment. Voters don’t see it as able to govern.
“Its policies
haven’t been much different from that of the Right, so when
conservatives are in power voters who want a change remember that
there’s not much hope from the traditional Left,” said Pierre
Martin, a political scientist and specialist in the European Left’s
electorate at the Institute of Political Studies in Grenoble. “That
favors radical challenges.”
Socialists or
social-democrats have also at times been associated with corruption,
as were former communist parties in Hungary or Poland. Repeated
ethical failings within France’s Socialist governments — starting
with Hollande’s first budget minister, revealed as a tax fraud —
have convinced voters that the Left had no particular claim to the
moral high ground.
The slogan “they’re
all the same” has been a powerful booster for new movements on both
the Left and Right. And in the U.K., Tony Blair’s lucrative career
since he left power may have hurt his party more than his
government’s actual record.
Even in the few
countries where it still clings to power, such as France, the Left
has paid a political price for austerity policies it has never been
able to challenge with success. In countries where it has been sent
back into opposition limbo, it is bogged down by soul-searching
exercises on traditional values that make taking power a distant
priority — as seems to be the case with the U.K.’s Labour Party
under Jeremy Corbyn. And it is increasingly split between those who
want to govern, and those who prefer to debate.
Voters aren’t
amused. From Madrid to Dublin and from London to Berlin, they have
mostly kept social democrats out of power since the beginning of the
crisis.
As
far as new challenges such as terrorism or immigration,
intellectually there’s not much from the Left that is interesting”
— Steven Coulter, political economy scholar
The traditional Left
loses votes even when its conservative adversaries are booted out of
government, as happened in Spain last December. It also takes a
beating when it has governed in coalition with center-right
opponents. That was the case earlier this month in Germany, where
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU conservative party took a dive in
regional elections — and dragged the SPD down with it; and last
month in Ireland, where the Labour Party suffered even more than
senior coalition partner Fine Gael, losing 26 seats of the 33 it
previously held in the lower house of parliament.
The former
Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe, apart from a social
democrat prime minister in the Czech Republic, are mostly governed by
conservatives, sometimes of the authoritarian type, as in Hungary.
Since last October’s election, the Sejm, the Polish parliament,
doesn’t even count a single member from a leftist political party.
François Hollande
will have to start bringing the jobless rate down significantly and
durably
Even on economic
policy, parties that could once be relied upon to push for fiscal
stimulus can’t do it jointly — if only because doing so would
corner Germany’s SPD party, the junior partner in Angela Merkel’s
coalition. In a time when even the European Central Bank is
advocating some form of Keynesianism — higher deficits to boost
growth, higher inflation to shrink debt — traditional Left parties
feel incapable or unable to agree on what used to be a core economic
tenet.
In countries where
the Left governs, its hold on power is tenuous. Hollande, who still
proudly carries the Left’s social-democratic torch, is the least
popular French president since opinion polls have existed. Italian
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, head of the center-left PD, has dropped
all references to any form of social democratic or socialist heritage
in his speeches — though for domestic reasons, he does criticize
Germany’s fiscal intransigence. Socialist Antonio Costa has been
Portugal’s prime minister for three months, but his party lost the
election to the incumbent conservatives and can govern only in
coalition with other leftist parties.
“The crisis of the
European Left is undeniable,” said Marc Lazar, professor and
director of the History Center at Sciences Po in Paris. “We’re in
a phase of Europe’s history where the economic crisis, the refugee
and immigration problem, the European Union challenges, put the
traditional parties from the Left in a tough spot.”
Ever since the
crisis started, the traditional Left parties have been keen on
denouncing the crisis of financial capitalism, rising inequalities,
or globalization run amok, said Steven Coulter, a political economy
scholar at the London School of Economics. “But if they talked
about the problems,” he said, “they didn’t talk much about the
solutions.”
Even when they do,
it isn’t enlightening. As far as new challenges such as terrorism
or immigration, Coulter said, “intellectually there’s not much
from the Left that is interesting.”
Left behind
It’s a far cry
from the triumphant years of social democracy in Europe three decades
ago.
“You could argue
back then that even when it was not in power the Left had won the
intellectual and cultural battle,” said Lazar, the historian. “The
golden age of social democracy was the golden age of capitalism —
if only because redistribution was possible.”
The solutions are
proving elusive. The Left looks unable to win voters’ hearts and
minds again just by claiming it can do what the Right does. There’s
not much hope either in focusing on social or cultural issues — if
only because most of those intellectual and political battles have
been won, either long ago or more recently, from the death penalty to
abortion rights to gay marriage. The politics of the “lifestyle
Left” doesn’t sell anymore at the ballot box.
Whether
the radical left is ready to govern, even in coalition with another
partner, remains the big unknown
No wonder the old
parties are being challenged by new movements pushing more radical
policies. Philippe Marlière, a professor of European studies at
University College London, notes that parties that once advocated a
radical “rupture” with the capitalist system have either
disappeared, or moved over to social-democratic ground – such as
what remains of the once-powerful French communist party. “The
difference between the radical and the traditional Left is no more
the choice between reform and revolution,” he says. One telling
sign of the times: Even the communist party supports France’s
participation in the euro.
Other movements that
challenge the very nature of what a political party used to be are on
the rise. The Spanish socialist party PSOE didn’t benefit from the
defeat of Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government last December —
it even lost seats. But the Podemos movement, together with the new
radical centrist and liberal party Ciudadamos, are now major players
in the country’s institutional politics.
Whether the radical
left is ready to govern, even in coalition with another partner,
remains the big unknown. There are no recent examples in Europe,
apart from the first six months of the Syriza government last year in
Athens. But Martin said that example doesn’t hold much significance
because “Greece’s problem is still to build proper government
institutions and a modern state, it doesn’t tell us much about the
rest of Europe.”
As the traditional
social-democratic parties keep wondering what it means to be on the
Left today, some are already proclaiming the end of the traditional
party system. Politicians such as France’s reformist economy
minister Emmanuel Macron hardly hide the contempt they have for a
bureaucratic party system where the traditional notions of “Right”
or “Left” have lost their significance.
“The real split,
more and more, will be between reformers and conservatives,” said a
Macron associate.
French Prime
Minister Manuel Valls, who at least on this issue agrees with Macron
even though both men look more and more like bitter rivals, keeps
repeating whenever asked that he is a man from the Left — although
he has long wanted to change the name of his own Socialist Party.
“Left,” Valls
once said, “is a wonderful word.” On the “wonderful” part,
European voters are still to be convinced.
.webp)
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