Felicity Slater looks back over the PES Re:new Convention, considering the broad themes addressed and its implications for the direction of progressive politics in Europe.
A name like ‘Re:new’ promised great ambition and did not disappoint. The PES Progressive Convention met high expectations with passion and enthusiasm. As a key building block of the party’s process for political renewal across Europe, the convention provided a unique opportunity for activists and politicians from the whole continent to meet and contribute to the future of progressive European politics.
Re:new is not just a convention but a whole process, whose objective is the modernisation to create a credible, progressive alternative capable of winning back power. While ultimately focussed on the next European elections in 2014, Re:new clearly also encompasses national politics, their makeup being projected onto the EU institutions.
It is barely necessary to reiterate the enormity of the task ahead for the PES: only four of the EU’s leaders are from the centre-left. The extent of the left’s political wilderness coupled with the increasingly common nature of the challenges faced across Europe thus gave a real sense of meaning and purpose to what was a truly transeuropean convention.
With over 2000 people and 100 organisations participating in a broad range of events, from workshops to film screenings and literary discussions, the Re:new convention certainly didn’t lack in dynamism. Almost fifty workshops covered topics from challenging hate politics, to taxing financial transactions, to EU enlargement; each one feeding into the broader debate on the PES’s four priority policy areas: A Fair Economy, A Just World, Active Democracy and Equal Societies.
Across and beyond the topics discussed at the workshops and plenaries, recurrent global messages emerged. Above all, creating an alternative to the Europe of ‘Merkozy’ became somewhat of a slogan for the convention, topically summing up the mood. Leaders therefore repeatedly stressed how the EU can be a real vehicle for social democracy; that now, with the EU institutions’ dominant right advocating more austerity and lacking a strategy for growth, the PES should confidently step up with a project of its own.
To this effect, rather than falling into the trap of simply saying yes or no to more Europe, with its implied endorsement of its current conservative path, the key debates emphasised how we should argue for a better EU. This argument seems especially pertinent to the UK, where Labour could do much more to emphasise that different kinds of European integration are possible. Persistently articulating a vision for a ‘better EU’ could address and constructively channel domestic discontent over the its current direction.
While the convention successfully highlighted how much common ground exists between all PES members, arriving at a consensus on some key issues appears distant. On a European financial transactions tax or Eurobonds, for example, UK Labour diverges significantly from almost all of its PES counterparts.
Nonetheless, the aim of Re:new is not to create a homogenous transnational party insensitive to national differences and subtleties. Furthermore, there is certainly no single strategy for victory in such a thoroughly diverse continent. However, the major hurdle for the Re:new process — indeed, its raison-d’être — is the almost complete lack of ‘tried-and-tested’ strategies for victory.
To this effect, next year’s French presidential election will provide a key indicator (and hopefully lessons for success) for the left across Europe. That a major Socialist victory is within reach was repeatedly evoked; held up as the beginning of an upward trajectory for the PES.
Fundamentally, Re:new demonstrates an acknowledgement across the European centre-left of the need to modernise. This includes elaborating a different vision for Europe that responds to people’s concerns as well as the right’s failings. Given the extent of both, we have a real opportunity to present a coherent, progressive alternative that inspires confidence. Certainly, the process is complex, not least given the heterogeneity of PES members, but as outgoing PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen put it, what other European party is capable of bringing together over 2000 people? Only through engaging in a process of such scale and ambition can the left learn the common lessons necessary to defeat the right. The debate continues.
Felicity Slater is a member of Progress and reported from the PES Convention in Brussels