DEAD END OF HISTORY THAT IS:

Europe's Center-Left Parties Stuck in a Dead End (Manfred Ertel, Hans-Jürgen Schlamp and Stefan Simons, 9/24/09, Der Spiegel)

The decline of left-leaning parties is more than a Scottish or even a British problem. The malaise, like a stubborn virus, has afflicted virtually every European social democratic party.

In a week in which left-leaning Germans are hoping that at least one in four voters will vote for the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) in next Sunday's election, their counterparts from Malmö to Lisbon face their biggest crisis ever. Some 26 years ago, the respected German-British sociologist Lord Ralf Dahrendorf predicted the end of the social democratic era. Now it looks like his prophecy is finally becoming reality.

At the beginning of the new century, social democrats and socialists, at the pinnacle of their power, controlled the governments in 12 of the European Union's 15 members. Reflecting the sentiments of then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, British Prime Minister Tony Blair proudly proclaimed: "We are the new radicals." The mantra of the modernization of their traditional political ideas was intoned in ponderous strategy papers. The frequently invoked "third way" was expected to lead to a "new center," in a bid to adapt social democratic policies to conform to a new social and economic reality -- and to make them appeal to new classes of voters.

The two model socialists, Schröder and Blair, met in Florence with Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, US President Bill Clinton, Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and EU Commission President Romano Prodi for a "summit of modernizers" -- a meeting of the world's social democratic movers and shakers.

Today, none of these reformers is still in office, and their "third way" has proven to be a dead end.

Decline of the Left

Ironically, the decline of the social democratic movement began in Scandinavia, a model region for leftists. A center-right coalition has ruled Denmark since 2001, and in 2006 then Prime Minister Göran Persson lost the general election in Sweden to the conservatives. In Sweden, the conservatives call themselves the Moderates, are perceived as the real modernizers and -- an even sharper thorn in the side of Swedish leftists -- as "modern social democrats."

Finland, Greece and the Netherlands were next to shift into the conservative camp. In Italy, the leaders of a social-democratically oriented party alliance were brought down in rapid succession. After the fall of leftist politician Massimo D'Alema and then Prime Minister Romano Prodi, Walter Veltroni, the popular former mayor of Rome, resigned his leadership of the newly founded Democratic Party.

Lionel Jospin failed to win the French Socialist Party's nomination for president, and in 2007 Blair resigned to make way for Brown. Last September, then Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer lost another six points in a legislative election, marking his Austrian Social Democratic Party's worst result in postwar history. Gusenbauer's successor, Werner Faymann, only managed to hold onto power with a smaller grand coalition government.

Since the European election in June, Europe's social democrats and socialists now hold only a quarter of seats in the European Parliament -- a historic low -- and they could face their next series of disappointments in German and Portuguese parliamentary elections on Sunday. The only bright spot is in oil-rich Norway, which is not part of the EU and has remained largely untouched by the global economic crisis, where Social Democratic Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's coalition government won reelection in mid-September. [...]

On the one hand, the social democrats' zealous pursuit of modernization and reform has put off some of their traditional supporters. In the search for new voters, center-left parties have neglected their base. [...]

The conservative parties, for their part, abandoned their excursions into market radicalism, reduced their demands for deregulation and embarked -- rhetorically, at least -- on a return to the center.

The reality is that voters don't particularly care whether they're governed by a party traditionally of the Left or of the Right, so long as it is currently Third Way. But the party bases care passionately, even derangedly, and would rather lose power by forcing a return to outdated ideological purity than continue succeeding by compromising between the First and the Second. Thus, the Tories dispose of Maggie and Labour tires of Blair--though the voters don't--and Al Gore runs against his own vice presidency as surely as the House GOP rages against the most successful period in the Party's own history.

Logically, one would expect Third Way third parties to arise under such circumstances. But the divide between liberals and conservatives on religious faith and, therefore, on morality is so stark these days that it's not likely to happen. If Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Leon Panetta, Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman and a few others announced they were establishing a new party and nominating Jeb Bush and Evan Bayh as their presidential ticket, it would be truly formidable. But the party's platform on abortion, gay marriage, and the like would be so divisive it would struggle to cohere.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2009 10:02 AM