Ten Reasons the Left Is Failing in Europe

All over Europe, one question lingers on many people's minds: Why are left-wing political parties doing so poorly?

After all, the left ought to be having a field day right now. Europe is struggling to emerge from the worst recession since World War II. It's an economic crisis in which the excesses of capitalism -- and capitalists themselves -- are regularly held up as the culprits. So where on Earth is Karl Marx just when he got his curtain call?

Not in Europe, evidently. Only two of the five largest European countries -- Spain and Britain -- are currently run by left-wing governments. France, Italy and Germany are all governed by the center-Right. And in June's European parliamentary elections, the left did very poorly, capturing between only 16 and 25 percent of the vote.

What is going on? I sat down with political scientist Jonathan Hopkin to find out. Hopkin is a senior lecturer in comparative politics at the London School of Economics who works on European political parties and welfare states. I pulled together 10 different hypotheses commonly trotted out to explain the left's dire state of affairs and asked Hopkin to comment. His answers have been edited for brevity and clarity:


1. Socialism is dead.

PD: Some people point to the collapse of socialism in explaining the left's failure to capitalize politically on the current crisis. Simply put, after Keynes, the left ran out of ideas. What do you make of this?

JH: In part, that's true. On the one hand, left-wing parties in Europe abandoned the classical Marxist view of using the state to socialize the means of production a long time ago. So the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s wasn't such a big blow to them because they weren't carrying out those ideas anyway.

On the other hand, the collapse of Keynesianism has had more serious implications. In a specific sense, Keynesianism can be defined as the use of monetary and fiscal policy to control the business cycle and maintain full employment. That's clearly been a problem for the left because if the mainstream left means anything, it means using the state to secure full employment. And that idea has fallen out of favor. In a broader sense, however, Keynesiansim was also associated with a full range of policies having to do with extending the welfare state and managing social risk, and those ideas also came under pressure in the 1980s and '90s. Ironically, some of those policies are now back in use. But the left lost the language that they used to employ in the post-war period to explain how the use of the state could be beneficial to the vast majority of the population.


2. Left-wing parties no longer pursue left-wing policies.

PD: So did left-wing parties just get the message wrong or did actually they lose track of who they were by pursuing right-wing economic policies? As a friend of mine put it, "I didn't leave the left. The left left me."

JH: Left parties have always stood for greater use of the state to achieve social ends and the attempt to moderate or civilize capitalism to make it safe for the working classes. That's a constant. But the technologies for doing that have changed over time as economic thinking has changed.

So the left was very pragmatic in adopting market ideas in the 1980s and '90s when these became popular. That's what Tony Blair was all about. He embraced markets -- just as he embraced the Internet -- because he understood those to be the future. In many ways, that's what it means to be on the left: to be on the vanguard of new ideas.

The problem was that people like Gordon Brown were insufficiently critical of what this all meant and then it blew up in their faces. The government went too far down the self-regulating road.


3. The right stole the left's ideas.

PD: Other people argue -- in contrast -- that it was the right who stole the left's ideas. So by embracing things like bank nationalization and bailouts during the current recession, the right has out-maneuvered the left on its own turf.

JH: In some ways, what the right has been smart to do is to figure out and accept which parts of the welfare state and Keynesianism are good for middle-class voters. Recall Thatcher saying, "The National Health Service is safe with Conservatives." She realized that this was politically shrewd. So some key parts of the welfare state have been left in tact by the Conservatives, and that could be seen as stealing the left's ideas. The problem is that the left can't gain much electorally anymore out of saying, "We are the party of the welfare state" because we are now in a new era in the politics of the welfare state. While it's understood that the welfare state can't be undone, it's also understood that it can't be expanded either.


4. Right parties just manage the economy better.

PD: So if both ideologies more or less embrace the same policies, is the right just better at managing the economy?

JH: I deny that completely! As far as I know, there is no evidence that the left is less competent at managing the economy. Sure, Labour in Britain was in charge during the latest crisis, as well as the IMF bailout of 1976. But the Tories were in office when the pound was booted out of the European Rate Mechanism in 1992. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest higher growth rates with right rather than left governments either.

But I do buy that the left has a more uphill battle in constructing its message. Where the left has a problem is that people who are left-inclined are less willing than they used to be to think of the government as a solution to their problems. So to the extent that people have less faith in politics than they used to -- and become dissatisfied with politics, democracy, politicians and political parties generally -- it makes it hard for a left message to resonate. The right can spin things as "getting government out of people's lives," but the left can't do that. Because in the end, the left is all about politics.


5. It's globalization's fault.

PD: Some people argue that globalization has worked against the left by preventing it from pursuing traditionally left-wing policies or by unleashing nationalistic impulses that are at odd's with the left's universalistic message.

JH: I don't buy the first point at all. It may be true to say that globalization makes left governments more constrained because they are more vulnerable to capital flight. But empirically, there is lots of work showing that exposure to the global economy doesn't necessarily lead to right-wing governments or the reduction of government services in left-governed states.

But globalization may have encouraged the resurgence of economic nationalism. So, for instance, one clear manifestation of globalization is the rise of immigration, which has in turn led to anti-immigrant sentiment in some corners of the electorate. And economic nationalism is hard for left-wing parties to deal with because it goes against their whole ideology of not discriminating by ethnicity or group.

The other thing that globalization does is to lead to changes in industrial production. Specifically, the fact that global production increasingly gets outsourced does lead to changes in the availability of low-skilled jobs in Western countries. And this in turn creates a space for extreme right political parties with an anti-immigrant message who can potentially poach on the left in their traditional constituencies.


6. Far-right parties are encroaching on the left's turf.

PD: This brings us to the rise of far-right parties, which have increased their popular support since the 1990s. Are these parties stealing the left's working-class voting base?

JH: This needs to be established empirically. Certainly in some of the cases I'm familiar with, there is some evidence of that happening. But it's hard to draw too many conclusions just yet.


7. The working class is no longer a meaningful concept.

PD: So is the demise of the left really all about the marginalization of the working class, both as an economic actor and as an idea?

JH: One alternative to globalization in explaining changes to welfare capitalism is demographic change and structural change from within. These are two things going on in Western countries that aren't obviously related to globalization, but which may tie to the left's decline.

On the one hand, you have the aging of the population, which creates a larger population of pensioners and reduces the size of the "core worker" category. That's not necessarily a problem for the left because the left has also traditionally been allied with pensions and the elderly. But it does change the electoral game because the structure of the electorate is very different. Whereas once the left had to compete for the votes of workers with families, that is now a smaller part of the electorate so their "bread and butter" voters are gone.

At the same time, industrial employment is in decline. The traditional areas where the Labour party, for example, found easy to organize were large factories. But newer forms of employment -- like the service sector -- are harder to mobilize around electorally. All of this is potentially more of a problem for the left than the right because this was the core of their support base. But we need more evidence.


8. Actually, it's the far left that's doing in the center left.

PD: What about competition from the left? In Germany's election, for example, the far left Die Linke party garnered about 10.9 percent of the vote, the first time a party to the left of the SDP has hit double digits. Is the existence of an "authentic left" weakening the center left?

JH: It depends. In Britain's case, Labour will lose the next election, but not because the left is losing to the far Left. Rather, Labour will lose a chunk of middle-income voters to the center right. In Germany, the SDP was squeezed by Die Linke (who took 10% of votes that might have gone to the SDP), but it's complicated because of chunk of lower-income population always went to the far right there as well. So the center left was squeezed from both sides.


9. The real story isn't about the decline of the left but the fragmentation of the center.

PD: In light of what we've just said about the rising popularity of far-right and far-left parties, is all of this really about the collapse of the center?

JH: I think you need to make a distinction between the left's strength electorally and politically. Electorally, it's not clear that the center left is doing all that poorly. European parliamentary elections like the ones in June are always a protest vote against the party in power. It's also important to view national elections cyclically. We could be having this same conversation at the end of the 1960s about the right when everyone was embracing welfare expansion and liberal attitudes on social issues. Remember that as recently as the late 1990s, 12 out of 15 European governments were center-left alliances. So the trends may be overstated.

But politically there is definitely a change. There has clearly been -- across Europe -- a general weakening of political parties. Membership is down, radical alliances are up, and volatility [changing parties] is up. Vote share is also declining.

10. It's the EU's Fault.