‘To resist is to win!’ That was the rallying cry that Dr Juan Negrin, the socialist prime minister who led the insurgency against Franco’s coup, used to inspire the forces of Spanish democracy in their last stand against the nationalists. It could – almost – have been the call given out by the left as François Hollande ended the Parti Socialiste’s two-decade exile from the Élysée Palace, seeming proof that opposition to the Conservative agenda alone is enough to get Labour back into government.
At first glance, the portents from France should raise a cheer on the British left. Nicolas Sarkozy – at the time, the very model of a modern Christian Democrat – was elected in 2007 promising to bring about a revolution in civil society and the economy. In 2012, he was ousted by a former special adviser to the previous socialist administration, his government mired in crisis and failure, his only forward offer a series of increasingly desperate overtures to his right flank.
The problem with first glances, though, is that they are almost always wrong. Talking to French voters, there was no greater love for Hollande than there had been for the policies of Ségolène Royal, the defeated socialist candidate in 2007. What decided this election was a bitter hatred for Sarkozy, and what kept the left united was a fear of a repeat of 2002, when their candidate, Lionel Jospin, failed to make the second round and Jacques Chirac went on to be re-elected. For Hollande, victory was not the difficult part. Governing will be.
Despite what the more excitable parts of the left’s Ostrich Tendency may have you believe, Hollande is not advocating an abandonment of austerity. His deficit reduction timetable is, in fact, identical to George Osborne’s. Where he differs from the Conservatives is in recognising the importance of growth to deficit reduction, beyond ‘cut and hope’. But an Hollande administration will still have to enact savage and politically difficult cuts. As for Ed Miliband’s Labour party, the challenge will be to articulate a progressive vision that adjusts to straitened circumstances. Not outlining those policies in opposition made sense in France, where voters are still largely wedded to their social model, but in Britain, where strong majorities recognise the need for some form of austerity, slavishly following the Hollande model is the road to defeat.
Equally, the elation at the victory in France should not obscure the fact that the European left is still facing an existential crisis. Hollande’s win ended a seven-year wait for a social democratic victory in the European core; since Tony Blair completed his hat-trick, progressives have been in retreat in Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy. The fiscal model that underpinned ‘Third Way’ socialists like Blair, Schroeder, Jospin, and, to a lesser extent, Romano Prodi, where rising tax receipts from a buoyant financial sector allowed state spending to increase with limited political consequence, has run out of road. The pattern for the next 30 years will be of fiscal contraction. That will make building social democracy in 21st century Europe a much harder task that it was in the 20th century.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that progressives shouldn’t celebrate Hollande’s victory, which defeated not just an economic policy based on sado-masochism, but a brutally divisive social policy based on the politics of identity. But the glow of victory shouldn’t obscure the battles ahead. The local elections in Britain have shown that Conservative austerity isn’t working. The French elections have shown that an alternative can win, while the elections in Greece, where regular politics have been almost entirely given over to fascisms of right and left, show the full and terrible consequences of unrestrained austerity. But progressive politics still lacks a ‘big idea’ for the 21st century, has still yet to outline a new politics for the future. Until the left can truly articulate the urgent challenges of the modern world, victories like that on Sunday will remain the exception, not the rule.
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Stephen Bush is a member of Progress, works as a journalist, and writes at adangerousnotion.wordpress.com
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I actually think that Hollande’s strategy of being vague about any potential cuts was a wise one, in general, not just in France. if Ed Miliband outlines where and when he will cut, he runs the grave risk of alienating his own supporters, vital to his campaign (left-wing ostriches though they may be). Better to follow Hollande’s strategy for now – criticise the gov’t and effortlessly pick up votes by talking about ‘growth’ without putting too fine a point on harsh deficit reduction plans.
The deluded right wing of the Labour party as portrayed by this depressing piece is more soul destroying than the behaviour of Clegg and Cameron.
The enemyof Hollande is adherence to the Maastricht Treaty which forbids deficit spending beyond 3% as advised by the master Keynes. An even bigger enemy is the debt based monetary system which allows banks to extract billions each year from the real economy. Another big enemy to socialism is the way in which the very wealthy are facilitated by politicians into avoiding billions each year in taxes.
Any decent socialist would be dealing with these issues.
The sign of a right wing bank lobbyist is that they want to keep the status quo of having the finance sector making enormous profits out of the real economy because they are too cowardly to deal with this, or are gaining donations from it. This is the only reason for austerity for the 99% – the fact that the top one percent which is mostly the finance sector is sucking out most of the wealth.
Care to expand on “fascisms of the left” in Greece?
Stephen asserts that the European left faces an “existential crisis”. But the evidence in truth points to an existential crisis of neo-liberalism.
And, in that crisis, some social democrats (like Stephen I believe) who had (rightly) responded to a formerly triumphant neo-liberal world via the Third Way now find themselves equivocating on the emergence of a new centre ground, a post-neo-liberal centre ground. A centre ground that wants government to rule the banks – not to be commanded by them. A centre ground that wants higher taxes for the wealthy. In other words, a centre ground that now has a strategy for reducing the deficit that lessens the burden on the squeezed poor and middle.
So Stephen is wrong to claim that European social democracy faces an existential crisis. Rather, social democratic values can now be proclaimed in an emerging new environment. Stephen is right to be cautious of this new environment. But he is wrong to be afraid of it. The light from the end of the dark neo-liberal tunnel is growing stronger.