In a few weeks, the Germans will be going to the polls. Italians may follow, even if it is never easy to predict when a new Italian government is formed. One thing that is almost certain in Europe’s larger countries is that the mainstream centre-left and centre-right are unlikely to garner the support from the electorate they had before the turn of the century.
There are, of course, different reasons for the decline of traditional parties in Europe. Subcultures that evolved in some countries, like the proliferation of political patronage, often gave parties in government an edge over the opposition parties, at least in the short term.
Italy’s Democrazia Cristiana and Partito Socialista lost their once unshakeable grip on the electorate because of corruption and partial rejection of the political patronage system by a section of the electorate.
One issue that keeps political observers baffled is why the centre-left mainstream parties suffer from voters’ haemorrhage more than the centre-right. In the five decades after World War II, social democratic parties played a vital role in nearly every democracy in Europe. In the UK, the Labour Party advocated moderate socialist policies, a strong welfare state, high taxes, income redistribution and a mixed economy.
The centre-right adopted many of the socialists’ strategies that were more popular with the electorate. For decades before the turn of the century, Europe’s bipolar political system encouraged economic growth and social stability. Workers felt protected from the destabilising effects of unbridled capitalism.
But European society has evolved in the last 50 years. The industrial working class and the unions from which social democrats drew their support have substantially eroded. The ideology of many social democratic parties moved away from their roots and adopted the “Third Way” popularised by New Labour under Tony Blair in the 1990s. Socialist party leaders in Europe no longer had any qualms to accept neoliberal economics, deregulation, privatisation and globalisation.
It will be a mistake for the left in Europe to look back nostalgically at the ‘golden age’ of social democracy and try to recreate it
The initial success of this change in political strategy gave social democrats more credibility with sections of the electorate. But in the longer term, it made them less distinct from the conservative and liberal parties. This loss of identity became even more evident with the surge of immigration from inside and outside Europe, the banking crisis of 2008 and the ensuing prolonged recession.
In Greece, PASOK, the once-powerful Socialist party, had to implement the policies imposed by the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission to prevent the country from defaulting. Many socialist voters fled to the far-left and anti-austerity party Syriza and others to the far-right, ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn. In Germany, traditional socialist voters supported the Alternative fur Deutschland to the right and the Greens to the left.
The loss of credibility on what the social democrats stood for and immigration, in particular, drove apart the traditional voter coalition that had sustained the social democrats for decades: the socially liberal, educated middle classes and the working classes who tend to be more socially conservative. It was, after all, the working classes that suffered most as a result of immigration and globalisation.
The fragmentation of the political system in Europe has so far proven that the decline of the centre-left and centre-right is not irreversible.
In Greece, after a short period of rule by Syriza, the Greeks once again elected the centre-right New Democracy in 2019. In Italy, the Partito Democratico lost much of its support to the Movimento 5 Stelle that at one time became the largest party but is now risking being split into different factions as a result of infighting.
It will be a mistake for the left in Europe to look back nostalgically at the “golden age” of social democracy and try to recreate it. Today’s society is very different from that of the latter half of the 20th century.
Today, people are worried about environmental issues like global warming and the future of the EU. A new underclass is evolving. The Hartz IV generation − named after reformer Peter Hartz − for whom work takes the form of fixed-term or part-time contracts, minimal wage growth and a rising sense of financial insecurity has no unions or political parties to protect it from growing social and economic inequality.
Mainstream politicians, not least Gucci socialists, have become accustomed to the privileges of office and power. They have lost sight of their primary purpose of representing citizens. Unless they start seeing the world through the eyes of ordinary people struggling to survive, they will be condemned to irrelevance.
johncassarwhite@gmail.com