TRADITIONAL LEFT’S LITANY OF WOE
THE collapse of Europe’s socialist political parties has been apparent for years, and it continued in 2018. By now, however, the left has the information it needs to pull out of its nosedive. It just has to start using it.
The defeats of 2017 – the neardeath experience of the Socialist Party in France, the deflation of the Social Democrats in Germany, and the Labour Party in the Netherlands, the shrinking of the entire left wing in the Czech Republic – apparently weren’t enough of a wake-up call.
The defeated parties haven’t regained popularity, and some, like the German Social Democrats, have slid further down in the polls.
The centre-left collapsed in the Italian election.
In Sweden, the Social Democratled government saw diminished support. In the UK, the Labour Party was unable to wrest power from the squabbling Tories. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party lost the election.
Just five EU countries are still ruled by centre-left or leftist governments – Greece, Slovakia, Malta, Portugal and Spain. Only Spain’s Socialists won power last year, in a parliamentary coup.
In Greece, the leftist bloc Syriza will probably lose power this year.
In the 2019 European Parliament election, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats – the centre-left umbrella party – is projected to be the biggest loser, and while the European United Left-Nordic Green Left is expected to gain a few seats.
There are three accepted explanations for this litany of woe. One is that the traditional parties took a wrong turn somewhere.
In his 2017 book, Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, the British economist and business professor Geoffrey Hodgson argues that, after making compromises with capitalism since the 1950s, the socialist and labour parties have failed to offer a “persuasive, feasible and democratic alternative to capitalism” after the 2008 global financial crisis.
Another view has to do with the changing class structure of society. Its proponents argue that the old working class is gone, taking with it the traditional base of the leftist parties united by class consciousness and by institutions that supported it.
The third concept is more radical than the first two. It posits a collapse of the traditional left-right paradigm.
The explanations of the traditional left’s demise approach the problem from different angles. The structure of society has changed for a number of reasons: broader access to education, deindustrialisation, migratory flows, the success of social policies pursued by the same leftist parties that are suffering now at the polls.
I’m not a leftist by any definition. No one who grew up in the Soviet Union, as I did in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, can be one without amnesia-inducing drugs. State-run redistribution will always turn into a corrupt, wasteful system that fails to make anyone happy regardless of how much repression is involved.
That said, I have a stake in the survival of the traditional left in the Western world. It has a proven record of making societies fairer, holding back imperial impulses, shortening wars.
The traditional left doesn’t have to give up these important roles. What it requires is clarity on three issues: whom it stands for, what it stands for, and how to communicate the ideas. The new potential support base includes diverse groups. Three of these are government employees who believe in the positive mission of the state; creative classes and intellectuals who stand for freedom, diversity and a massive role for educational institutions; a precarious working class that feels ill-treated by a system rigged in favour of the rich. All of them share an interest in one thing: fairness.
This time of desperation for the traditional left is a time for bold alliances and for clear ideas promoted cleverly with specific target groups in mind.