De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
The workers’ parties aren’t working.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
Anyone despairing at the trajectory of their career should spare a thought for Europe’s socialist politicians. At the turn of the century over two-thirds of citizens in the European Union lived in countries run by leaders from the centre-left. The continent’s future looked red, or at least rose-tinted. Granted, the likes of Gerhard Schröder in Germany and Tony Blair in Britain were hardly dyed-in-the-wool pinkos; they aimed not to overthrow capitalism but to temper its excesses. Yet their trick of pinching the right’s best ideas and mixing them with leftie shibboleths soon lost its lustre. By 2016 the number of Europeans living in countries run by social democrats had slumped to just one-third. Those who assumed the pendulum would soon swing back leftward have had their hopes dashed, then dashed again. Today only three of the EU’s 27 national leaders are progressives—Pedro Sánchez in Spain, Mette Frederiksen in Denmark and Robert Abela in tiny Malta. They represent just a tenth of the union’s population.
It could soon be less. On May 8th it was announced that Ms Frederiksen had failed in her initial bid to form a coalition government following elections in March. Her deputy as prime minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, has been asked by the king to see if his centrist outfit can cobble together an alliance, thus booting Ms Frederiksen into opposition. The canny incumbent may yet find a way to cling to office, despite having led the Social Democrats to their worst electoral score in well over a century. But even a Danish reprieve would be a scant consolation for her fellow European socialists. Ms Frederiksen is the black sheep of the continental left, having thrived in part by being ostentatiously tough on migrants, a formula that many in her camp feel betrays the humanist roots of their creed. (They are much happier with her willingness to stand up to Donald Trump, who inadvertently gave Ms Frederiksen a boost in the polls by threatening to invade Greenland.)
Once the party of labour, Europe’s centre-left now spends much of its time searching for gainful employment. Could the continent become a socialist-free zone, at least at the top of national politics? Mr Sánchez is the left’s last great hope, yet he will face voters within a year or so, and his party is lagging behind the centre-right. It is not clear who would replace him as a figurehead for the defenders of the euro-proletariat. The Netherlands is the only one of the EU’s biggest ten countries in which socialists (after having merged with an erstwhile Green rival) have eked out a narrow lead in the polls—and the Dutch are not due to hold national elections for four years. A few smaller countries may deliver left-leaning governments, for example Sweden or Finland. In Germany and Poland the centre-left is a junior partner in governing coalitions; in Romania it recently brought one down.
But it is harder than ever to imagine the left running the show in a country with real sway in EU affairs. The German SPD has been battered in recent regional elections and languishes at 13% in nationwide polling, behind the centre-right, the xenophobic AfD and the Greens. In France no socialist is polling well ahead of next year’s presidential election (the candidate in 2022 got just 1.8% of the vote). In many parts of central Europe there is barely a socialist party to contest elections, let alone win them. Beyond a few town halls, the only modicum of power socialists still hold is at EU level, and even that is much weakened. The centre-right holds most of the big jobs in Brussels and is busy implementing a deregulatory agenda, over the progressives’ objections.
What went wrong? Endless academic tracts attribute the left’s decline to the gradual disappearance of the factories, docks and mines that once provided socialism’s natural habitat. For a while the centre-left seemed to have done a good job replacing blue-collar workers with graduate types: out with metal-bashers, in with schoolteachers. Fair enough. Still, the challenge of adapting to the times should have been yet more acute for the socialists’ historical rivals, the Christian Democrats. They faced a continent where churches were emptying even faster than trade-union halls. Somehow the centre-right managed, while the left did not.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
More acute has been the effect of political fragmentation. Social democrats used to be one of two main options on Europeans’ ballot papers. Even in the wake of election losses the political cycle could be trusted to send power back their way given time (as it continues to do for example in America, where Democrats will make gains in the midterm elections in November). The splintering of European polities into many parties has also affected the centre-right. But socialists have seen their share of the vote nibbled on three sides. Other parties of the left, both Greens and hardened Marxist types, have made inroads. Some lefties ditched the party for a lurch into the political centre, notably in France under Emmanuel Macron (once a minister in a Socialist government). Many „left-behind” post-industrial areas that once voted for progressives flocked to populists on the right.
One optimistic interpretation of the left’s woes is that its faded prospects reflect its past achievements. Who in Europe now calls into question the importance of pensions, paid holidays, soaking the rich and other socialist tenets? The movement’s cadres warn against such complacency. Just because social rights have been secured in the past does not mean they aren’t under threat, says Giacomo Filibeck, secretary-general of the Party of European Socialists, which brings together parties on the continental left. There are still plenty of workers left in Europe. They may fret about artificial intelligence pinching their jobs just as much as their forebears did about pit closures. Yet few seem to think the political left speaks for them. Socialists spent decades warning capitalism would eat itself. The cruel joke is that it ate them first.
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