The New Low Lights On The Left

If politics, like the economy, moves in slow but inexorable cycles, then the center-left that has for so long defined European politics seems to be in a deep and protracted recession. No matter what they call themselves—Social Democrats, Socialists or Labour—rarely have they simultaneously appeared so troubled. In Britain, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown's popularity has hit rock bottom. Germany's Social Democrats are a dwindling party, squeezed between conservatives in the center and populist extremists on the left. In France and Italy, telegenic new-style rightists have managed to reduce the left-wing opposition to tatters. Even Spain's José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the last unchallenged mainstream-left ruler of a major European power, looks increasingly besieged as the Spanish economic miracle crashes all around him.

Why is Europe's left struggling so? Last week Germany's Social Democrats dumped their fourth chairman in as many years and nominated a charisma-free career bureaucrat, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to face off against the popular Chancellor Angela Merkel in the September 2009 national election. Only days earlier the annual late-summer confab of the French Socialists in La Rochelle erupted in discord and intrigue over the party's direction. To be sure, each party's troubles are shaped by personnel and circumstance—from British voters' ennui with Brown after 11 years of Labour rule to Italy's venerated tradition of a fractious, self-destructive left. Yet they are also struggling with a common clutch of problems. Among them, they are facing a center-right that is increasingly adept at cherry-picking policies that used to be considered "left"—like education, environmentalism and social justice. The current economic downturn also tends to favor conservatives, whom voters generally see as more prudent on issues affecting the economy.

But the biggest dilemma is that most parties on the left have not figured out how to adapt their old welfare-statist ideologies to modern economic realities—while appealing to voters who see modern reform as a betrayal of their parties' traditional socialist ideals, and who often have more-extreme left-wing parties to turn to. David Marquand, a former British Labour M.P., says the left finds it much more difficult than the right to co-opt or even engage the opposition. "Their inheritance as class-based parties has kept alive a powerful myth of class treachery and betrayal if they try to cooperate with the right," he says. The result: Europe's mainstream leftist parties are facing not a temporary downturn but the gravest crisis in decades.

Exhibit A of these dilemmas is Germany's SPD—even if it still shares power as the junior partner in a coalition with Merkel's Christian Democrats. The opaque backroom deal that produced Steinmeier's nomination last week couldn't have been in starker contrast to the proud and public spectacle taking place at the same time across the Atlantic, as America's parties finished the process of nominating their candidates. Steinmeier's main intraparty rival, SPD Chairman Kurt Beck, didn't bow out with a graceful call for party unity but resigned in a huff, blaming unspecified "intrigues" and "plots."

Coming in the midst of a crisis that has seen the SPD's membership plummet and nationwide support drop as low as 20 percent last month, the move is more a sign of the party's continued disarray than of any fresh beginnings. France's Socialists are in even worse trouble. Leaderless and without a clear platform ever since Nicolas Sarkozy trounced them in last year's presidential election, they're torn between joining forces with the communists and various marginal leftists groups, and moving toward a more social-democratic middle. Sarkozy has also done a brilliant job destabilizing them, not only by naming prominent leftists to his ostentatiously bipartisan cabinet. One day before the Socialists' unseemly summer conference, Sarkozy unveiled plans for a new job subsidy akin to America's earned income tax credit—to be financed by a new tax on investment capital. French business is fuming—but so are the Socialists, who seem helpless as they watch Sarkozy sprinkle his policies with such classic left-wing measures.

Italy's Silvio Berlusconi has also done a brilliant job poaching the left's policies. He has slapped banks and energy companies with a new €1 billion "Robin Hood tax"—ironically, after his leftist predecessor had just cut corporate taxes. His Finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, is a prominent anti-globalization firebrand. Ditto for the British Conservatives, riding high at 45 percent in current polls, compared with just 26 percent for Labour. Conservative leader David Cameron has adopted a softer, nicer conservatism by embracing green policies and social justice. But at a deeper level, Labour suffers from an ideological malaise as well. There's suspicion among the middle classes that Labour—and, in particular, Brown, who has retreated from Tony Blair's unabashed support for market-friendly policies—has an instinctive weakness for an old-style "tax and spend" strategy that hasn't paid dividends. Spending on education and health, for example, has more than doubled without a corresponding improvement in service.