The parties of the European left were the biggest losers of the first round of elections after the financial crisis. Today, with publics become increasingly sceptical of fiscal austerity, a second round of political defeats would be devastating.
It would signal that the left has not confronted the reasons why a neoliberal-inspired collapse badly exposed a lack of credibility in their political, social and economic offers.
In the first round opponents on the right were able to adeptly set the fight in the arena of leftwing prolificacy and debt and deficits. Public debate has moved on for round two: centre-right governments are in a corner as heightened anger over inequalities of wealth and power and the spiralling social costs of their ill-suited remedies boils over.
This has reassured left-of-centre parties who have vowed to take on vested interest and market domination with increasing confidence. French presidential frontrunner François Hollande has passionately taken aim at the world of finance; UK Labour leader Ed Miliband can claim success in shifting national political debate onto the terrain of ‘responsible capitalism’; and over in the US Barack Obama has opened his election campaign by fighting for a ‘Buffett rule’.
This is encouraging. Yet beyond the political positioning and new rhetoric it cannot be confidently asserted that a long-term political project is emerging or that a lasting paradigm shift beyond the economic orthodoxy of the past thirty years is very evident. In short, the credibility gap has not disappeared.
This was the premise which underpinned the Policy Network and Wiardi Beckman Stichting ‘Amsterdam Process’ of enquiry into why the parties of the European left keep losing elections – and how this can be reversed. The output from this process is published in the form of A Centre-Left Project for New Times: Confronting the Challenges of Electability and Governance, a distinctive manual for political renewal which sets out how left-of-centre parties might begin to formulate a realistic and transformative new agenda.
It argues that the process of renewal is best approached by understanding and grappling with the interplay and synergies between four overlapping strategic areas:
The first is political values. These work best not as grand abstract principles, but as ethical ideals and governing values that have purchase in the real world where there are inevitably hard choices and competing alternatives.
The second area is policy challenges and core political concerns. Social democrats need to identify the most insistent social and economic challenges, and then outline a realistic political agenda that speaks to and protects a broad social constituency, acknowledging that many traditional pillars of the social democratic offer are exhausted.
The third leg is institutional and structural constraints. Social democratic parties have acquired a wealth of governing experience over the last two decades. But they often underperformed in government as a result of fault-lines within the very system of representative democracy and governance itself. This was the consequence of a failure to understand how to overcome the institutional constraints and pathologies arising from the process of governing in contemporary democracies.
The fourth area is public attitudes and preferences. The last decade has witnessed a dramatic shift in Europe’s self-belief and confidence. Grasping the extent to which this development has affected the basic attitudes and preferences of voters is absolutely indispensable for European social democracy, which in many countries stands accused of being out of touch with the political zeitgeist, and important strands of public opinion.
Over four years after the onset of the crisis, voters are worried about the ‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’. If social democracy is to capitalise, it needs to find a new settlement which has adapted ideologically and programmatically for the times.
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Michael McTernan is a contributing author to the Policy Network/Wiardi Beckman Stichting publication A Centre-Left Project for New Times