What is left for Europe’s mainstream center-left? Socialist and social democratic parties that shaped the protective European social model and ruled much of the continent a decade ago have been among the chief political casualties of the financial and economic crisis since 2008.
More than just a cyclical trough, this may be a longer-term decline because the left has lost its political narrative. Many young and blue-collar voters, angry over mass unemployment and spending cuts, have deserted to protest parties of the anti-capitalist hard left or the Euroskeptical, anti-immigrant far right, as the political landscape fragments, polling evidence shows.
Others trust middle-of-the-road conservatives such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel more than the left to run the economy in tough times. And some have simply stopped voting out of disillusionment.
Germany’s opposition Social Democrats (SPD) have just recorded their second worst election result since World War II They now face an ugly trilemma between entering a “grand coalition” under Merkel on unequal terms, staying out and seeing her possibly team up with the Greens, the SPD’s natural partner, or being punished by voters at a rerun election.
Socialists or social democrats still head 13 of the 28 EU governments and are in coalition in five others, but they are often driven to pursue unpopular policies.
Austria’s Socialists lost votes last month, though they remain the largest party. Italy’s center-left Democratic Party, which now heads a shaky left-right coalition, bled votes to the anti-establishment 5-Star protest movement in a February election and is riven by factional squabbling.
In Greece, Ireland and Spain, center-left parties are paying a high electoral price for having supported public pay and pension cuts required by international creditors.
In Britain, the opposition Labour party is still distrusted because it presided over a deregulated financial market bonanza that ended in the crash of 2008, wrecking the reputation for economic competence once built by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
In France, one of the few countries with an absolute center-left parliamentary majority, Socialist President Francois Hollande is deeply unpopular as his government dithers between old-style tax-and-spend policies.
•Reuters
