In Germany, the Social Democrats dropped a stunning 8
percentage points in local elections in their Hesse heartland last weekend,
even though Helmut Kohl's Centre-Right coalition Government in Bonn is in the
doldrums. The French Socialist Party is heading for humiliation in next
weekend's general election.
Meanwhile, the Italian Socialist Party, utterly compromised
by its corruption, faces near-extinction at the next general election, likely
later this year, with the former-communist (and relatively clean) Party of the
Democratic Left, now also a member of the Socialist International, slumping to
around 17 per cent of the popular vote. Spain's ruling Socialist Workers’ Party
is also on the slide in the wake of revelations that it has been involved in
bribery rackets.
If one adds the electoral failures in recent years of the
Greek, Swedish and Dutch socialists and the miserable experience of democratic
socialists in the former communist countries of eastern Europe, it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that social democracy is in a real mess
across the continent. And that is before Labour's plight in Britain is taken
into account.
So what has gone wrong with European social democracy? There
is, of course, no single answer. In eastern Europe, socialism is
understandably unpopular, even in democratic garb. In the west, each socialist
party has particular reasons for not doing well: corruption here, an incompetent
leadership there.
But, once the east-west divide is taken into account, to
consider only the problems faced by each party in its own country is to miss
the point. It is not merely a coincidence of unpropitious national circumstances
that is responsible for the mess in which west European socialists find
themselves.
Every socialist party is suffering from the collapse in the
past 20 years of the national Keynesian model of economic management, a
collapse that has pushed social democracy inexorably towards accommodation
with economic neo-liberal-ism. Not one left party in Europe has an economic
strategy capable of persuading voters that it can do any more about unemployment
than the free-market right.
Every socialist party has also been hit by much the same social
changes. Everywhere in western Europe, the manual working class has declined.
Everywhere, social democracy's attempts to augment class-based politics with
technocratic managerialism have failed to provide a stable new electoral base.
Young people in particular find social democratic parties a major turn-off
throughout the continent.
In short, European social democracy faces a crisis - not the
one so long predicted by Leninists, according to whom social democrats would
be outflanked by a militant working class under Leninist leadership, but
something just as profound. The fact that so few in the Labour Party have
recognised that this crisis exists (let alone thought it through) is a deeply
depressing comment on the parochialism and lack of intellectual depth that now
characterises Labour's political culture.
