‘Extinction’ warning to UK’S Labour as Europe’s centre-left struggles
Britain’s Labour Party is licking its wounds after another electoral drubbing, and can look to the decaying remains of once-great movements in Europe for a sign of potential worse to come.
Across the continent, insiders and analysts say, social democratic parties are struggling for relevance: riven by infighting, lacking a coherent message, hobbled by weak leadership. The coronavirus pandemic has only accentuated a trend years in the making, since at least the 2008 financial crisis, and cultural fault lines have emerged to shape debates such as Brexit in Britain or republican values against “radicals” in France.
“Political parties have no divine right to exist and progressive parties of the centre and centre-left are facing marginalisation, even extinction, across the Western world,” former Labour prime minister Tony Blair wrote in the New Statesman magazine.
Democrat Joe Biden’s election to the White House is scant comfort to the European left, he stressed.
Beyond the pandemic, Blair wrote, a political realignment is still at play in the United States, culture wars remain a potent rallying cry for the right, and the Republicans could yet coalesce behind a more disciplined leader than Donald Trump.
“In short, leave to one side Joe Biden, and around today’s Western world there are only flickers of a progressive agenda with deep majority support,” he said, appealing for a new centre-left politics in an era of rapid technological change.
Grandees such as Blair are right to be worried, argued Sophie Pornschlegel of the European Policy Centre in Brussels, after Labour saw Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives make deep inroads into its traditional heartlands last week. Across Britain, France and Germany, the old industrialised working class is no more and the centre ground has shifted, she said.
“There is a stronger identification with parties that reflect cultural lines,” Pornschlegel said.
“I think that’s a negative development, but it is one that cannot be undone, and that’s why social democracy has such an issue at the moment, because they need to define themselves along this new conflict line — and they don’t want to.
“There’s definitely a lack of leadership and a lack of ideas,” she said, commenting that Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) was finally crafting new policy proposals ahead of September elections, but that it was “too late”.
ACROSS THE CONTINENT, SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTIES ARE STRUGGLING FOR RELEVANCE... RIVEN BY INFIGHTING, LACKING A COHERENT MESSAGE, HOBBLED BY WEAK LEADERSHIP