Paul Anderson, Chartist column, July-August 2002
Just three years ago, social democratic parties were in power in all but four west European democracies — Spain, Norway, Ireland and Luxembourg. Crucially, Germany, France, Italy and Britain, the four largest countries, all had governments formed by social democrats or in which social democrats were the dominant coalition partner.
Although the picture was by no means completely rosy — the polls suggested that both the Italian centre-left and the Austrian social democrats would lose to their next general elections — many on the left looked forward to the prospect of a new era of social democratic hegemony in western Europe.
How different the picture looks today. Since the end of 1999, governing socialists have been ousted in Austria, Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Holland and France — and there is a strong chance that the German social democrats are heading for defeat in the autumn. If they lose, only Britain, Greece, Sweden, Finland and Belgium will have governments of the centre-left.
So what has gone wrong? There is no easy answer. Each country that has swung to the right in the past three years has done so for particular reasons. The Italian centre-left, for example, was punished by the voters for its fractiousness and indecisiveness, and the French socialists were undone by Lionel Jospin’s incompetent campaign and widespread protest voting for far-left candidates in the first round of the presidential election. The right-wing parties that have won power have very little in common, as none other than William Hague recognised in a recent article.
But there are common themes in the demise of governments of the left. All were victims of popular concerns about crime and immigration that were successfully exploited by right-wing populists. And all suffered from the abandonment of left parties by many of their traditional core working-class supporters, disillusioned by the perceived failure of centre-left governments to make a difference to their lot.
These two phenomena are undoubtedly linked. The things that working-class voters feel let down over by social democratic governments are crime, jobs, housing and pay — and the belief that immigrants are responsible for rising crime, housing shortages and the scarcity of well-paid employment is widespread.
So should the defeated centre-left parties respond by adopting the rhetoric of the right and talking tough on crime and asylum-seekers? That is certainly the advice of the Blair government in Britain — and there is no doubt that, in purely electoral terms, it can be an effective short-term tactic.
In the longer term, however, it cannot be a solution. Not only does it pander dangerously to prejudice, giving a spurious legitimacy to racism that can only benefit the right — it does nothing to tackle the root causes of working-class disillusionment with centre-left governments: the persistence of unemployment, low pay and poor housing.
To regain credibility, the centre-left throughout Europe needs to offer something more than efficient administration of the status quo and a few palliatives for the worst excesses of neo-liberalism. And that means developing coherent and ambitious programmes at both national and EU level for creating jobs, eliminating poverty, reducing insecurity, improving public services and increasing the accountability of political institutions. In other words, rather than echoing the right, it needs to set out a distinctively social democratic reformism that convinces voters that there really is an alternative.
