Content area
Full text
Across Europe, traditional parties of the left seem to be in terminal decline. In Western Europe, support for social-democratic and socialist parties sank to insignificance in the 2017 French and Dutch elections. In the 2018 German parliamentary elections, the once-mighty Social Democratic Party (SPD) received its lowest vote share since the end of the Weimar Republic, and in Scandinavia, long the redoubt of social democracy, center-left parties struggle to maintain 25 to 30 percent of the vote. The situation in Central and Eastern Europe is even grimmer. In Hungary, the Socialist Party (MSzP), initially one of the strongest post-transition parties, garnered only 12 percent of the vote in April 2018 elections for the National Assembly. In Poland, the social-democratic Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) is no longer represented in parliament, and in the Czech Republic just 7 percent of voters opted for the center-left Social Democratic Party (CSSD) in 2017 parliamentary elections. The trend continued in May 2019 elections to the 751-member European Parliament, where the center-left Socialists and Democrats bloc lost 38 of the 191 seats that it had carried in 2014.
Despite the Europe-wide nature of this trend, most explanations of the left's problems focus on idiosyncratic region-specific factors. For example, many analyses of diminishing support for leftist parties in Western Europe emphasize changing class and value structures. The decline of West European manufacturing during the late twentieth century weakened the working class and unions, shrinking the left's traditional voting base and reducing the heft of the organizations that had been its most important affiliates. During the same period, postmaterialist values such as self-expression, environmentalism, cosmopolitanism, sexual freedom, and gender equality took on a new prominence in Western societies. Voters holding such values considered themselves to be on the left, but they differed from longtime leftist voters who remained wedded to national identities, prioritized law and order, and favored growth over environmental protection. The divisions between "new" and "old" left voters rendered socialist and social-democratic parties conflicted and confused.
For postcommunist Eastern Europe, a popular explanation of the left's demise emphasizes anti-incumbent bias. In this view, disenchanted voters without strong party identifications simply punished incumbents by kicking them out of office. This resulted in power alternation between slow and fast reformers, represented by (more...