Following the German election, the centre-left, which ten years ago dominated 13 out of 15 west European governments, now looks a shrunken and confused political force. Sweden, which goes to the polls in a year's time, seems likely to vote out the Social Democrats. In Italy, which also votes next year, an unpopular ruling coalition of the right faces a weak coalition of the left that stretches from moderate Christian Democrats to anti- globalisation communists, under the leadership of Romano Prodi.
It is also evident that the left is fragmenting, with the far left gaining votes in many countries at the expense of the centre-left. Where far left parties are in a governing coalition (the Socialist Left party in Sweden) or in opposition (the Rifondazione Communista in Italy) they generally act as an electoral drag on the larger centre-left party—being necessary for parliamentary votes, but putting off centrist voters.
Analyses from within the parties of the left tend to fall into two camps—those which believe that their policies are not left-wing enough, and those which believe they are not right-wing enough. But where the goal of both wings was once socialism—quick or slow—now the choice is starker: socialism or not. The challenge, offered most clearly by New Labour, Europe's most successful party of the left, is to drop socialism—and win.
Germany's reformers on the centre-left think, sourly, that Gerhard Schröder flirted with the idea but didn't see it through. Wolfgang Novak, a former aide to Schröder, now in the private sector, one of those who developed the German equivalent of the third way, die Neue Mitte (the new centre), told me that "if Schroeder had done the Neue Mitte in 1998 we could have pushed it through. He would have had to take on the party but he could have won. Now Merkel will do it… She will probably be able to do so, because if she wins, she'll have a lot of power within her party."
But Schröder's labour market reforms were radical enough to create space for a new leftist splinter, the Left party, led by the former SPD chancellor candidate Oskar Lafontaine and the former East German communist Grigor Gysi. Significantly, Lafontaine was happy to borrow a kind of populist nationalism from the right, inveighing against Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers), a Nazi-era usage of whose provenance he must have been aware.
The French presidential elections are scheduled for 2007, and there seems little chance that the left will win. It is only the scrap between the two leading candidates of the centre-right, Dominique de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy, which gives the Socialist party any hope. The Socialists split over the vote on the European constitution—with the former prime minister Laurent Fabius leading a substantial minority in backing a "no" vote. There is a good deal of jostling for the party's presidential candidature—Jack Lang (former culture minister) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn (former finance minister) have both declared themselves. Lionel Jospin, who came third to Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, is making a discreet comeback. Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille who, when minister of employment, introduced the 35-hour week, may also run.
The conclusion some of these leaders draw from the referendum vote is that the party must move to the left. Talking to Le Monde in September, Aubry said: "We have to listen to the French who rejected the liberal direction of Europe, and the government's policies. This is our responsibility, because we haven't yet been able to propose an alternative to the country."
The victors in the referendum were—as they were in the 2002 presidential vote—the far left and the far right, united in their hostility to globalisation, the EU and reform. The lock that the extremes have on French politics, especially of the left, remains tight. Although Strauss-Kahn appears the best bet for the left's presidential candidate, he a) may not get his party's votes, because of their (correct) perception of him as closest to the centre and b) will be hobbled in the presidential programme he proposes by parties of the left picking up disillusioned leftists and the rightist parties picking up centrists. The party leftists are making much of the running: Fabius told the party's summer school at La Rochelle in August that the Socialists must be firmer in their opposition and that its politics must be "more Bové than Sarko"—modelled more on the views of José Bové, the anti-globalisation campaigner, than on those of Sarkozy.
Italy's left faces an unpopular prime minister in Silvio Berlusconi: unpopular not so much for monopolising the broadcast media or playing the clown both nationally and internationally, but because his promised transformation of a sluggish economy has not happened, instead, it has slipped to the bottom of the European growth league. The left—a coalition of parties like the centrist-liberal Margherita, the former Communist Democratic Socialists and the far left Rifondazione—has been unable to discuss strategy in anything other than a formal way, and now believes it is too late to do so. The Margherita deputy and former minister Enrico Letta says that the strategy of the left is to go into the election with the Rifondazione, but to win enough seats to dispense with its aid. But—given the polarisation evident in Italy as elsewhere—it is likely that the Rifondazione will increase its vote and the centre parties may lose out. Letta warns that the left has a fearsome legacy to cope with—almost no growth, industrial restructuring, militant unions, and larger than ever inequalities between north and south. Come an election, many on the left quietly fear, Berlusconi's money and media may win it for him again.
Sweden, which has been the European byword for both social democratic discipline and success, now shows alarming signs of being as fissiparous as the Latins. Göran Persson, in office for a decade and visibly tired, has no natural successor. The right, ably and moderately led, is winning converts with its charge that (relatively) high unemployment and abuse of the sick pay and unemployment benefits system have escaped the left's control. The Social Democrats' governing coalition ally, the Socialist Left (former communists), is splitting; and a new feminist party, led by Gudrun Schyman, has been launched, and is certain to leech votes from the Social Democrats.
There are counter-trends: the comeback of the Dutch Labour party, for example, and the narrow victory for the left in Norway's election in September. But the only two governments of the left that look like lasting are the Spanish and the British. Though the government of José Zapatero—elected last year after al Qaeda-inspired bombs killed nearly 200 people on trains in Madrid—is said to be further to the left than New Labour, it has quietly copied the latter in introducing tax cuts for the low-paid and attempting greater financial discipline in the healthcare system. Zapatero, who has become closer to Blair this year, has established his own "third way" group, and his Socialists share ideas and tactics with New Labour on an increasingly routine basis.
Blairism, oddly, seems the only ideology of the left still standing. Oddly, because the British prime minister is unpopular with his own party, and with most of the other leftist parties of Europe. None of the major social democratic parties believes any longer in achieving their historic goals—but none can say so because the members won't let them and the parties to their left will benefit. So, biding their time and clinging to the wall, they decline—and with them, the possibility of renovating the European social model on social democratic terms.
