Staying Safe in the Middle of the Road

It wasn't that long ago that Britain's Labour and Conservative parties were locked in hand-to-hand ideological combat. Following the economic tumult of the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher won office on a radical anti-union, anti-left reform agenda. A few years later, Labour fought back with a hard-left campaign manifesto that was so hugely unsuccessful it became known as "the longest suicide note in history." Then Thatcher blew London's financial center wide open with the "big bang" of deregulation. This, surely, was politics as it should be—muscular thinking grappling with the great issues of the day.

Not anymore. In the relative calm and comfort of Britain in the early-21st century, removed from the history-rocking crises of the past, Labour and the Tories find themselves scrabbling over a small ideological patch in the middle of the political spectrum. Like the space being contested, the thinking that emerges from it is often small and cramped. "What politicians increasingly are finding is that the messages that work are those that don't have any ideological content," says Peter Kellner, president of the market-research company YouGov. As a consequence, says Claire Fox, director of London's Institute of Ideas, "there's a gap in the market of big ideas. Our world has deemed major ideological differences an irrelevance and adopted a pragmatic managerialism. Of course, there are still rows to be had, but they are over the most petty and minor points."

The politics that results from this muddle in the middle resembles one of those Russian matryoshka dolls: a Thatcher (Conservative) inside a Tony Blair (Labour) inside his successor, Gordon Brown (Labour), waiting to be swallowed up by a pink-cheeked David Cameron (Conservative). The policies emerging from a soft middle are liable to be, well, soft. Tackle a looming pensions crisis? Not when Labour and the Conservatives are so busy tripping over each other to lighten the inheritance-tax burden for middle-class families.

It's no coincidence that the noisy engine room of political change in Europe these days is in France, where there is no ongoing battle for the center ground. While the rest of Europe seems to be avoiding radical politics at all costs, France is forging a new path. The center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy started out by neutering the opposition Socialists, pulling their best and brightest—like Bernard Kouchner, whom he named foreign minister—and others into his orbit, creating what in France amounts to a radical center. Now Sarkozy is wielding his reform agenda like an anti-riot truncheon—taking his battle to, among others, postal workers, teachers, rail and bus workers, nuclear power-plant employees and hospital staff—all of whom were on strike at some point over the past few weeks to protest ambitious Sarkozy moves like pension reform. The Socialists, torn between rallying around the old Red left and moving toward the center, are stalled—resistant still to the modernization that has swept through much of the European center-left. This leaves Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement with an open field: "There's nothing across the street," as Gaël Sliman of the polling firm BVA says. And it leaves Sarkozy standing tall on the ramparts, unlike his more timid European counterparts: "We will not surrender and we will not retreat," he said last week.

But France is the exception in Europe. More typical is Denmark, which held a little-noticed election two weeks ago. If the results—the center-right government of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen won a third consecutive term in office—weren't splashed across European front pages, it's because the campaign was a bit of a yawn. The core issues in Denmark, familiar to other Europeans, are weighty enough: tax reform and welfare, immigration and the environment. But the main parties broadly agree on them, and the electoral wrangling was more about who wields power than major policy differences. After losing the election, Social Democrat leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt said calmly, "We'll do it next time."

"Next time" could well be the unofficial motto of Germany's reform-shy mainstream parties. The promise of economic liberalization—embodied first in center-left Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and then in his center-right Christian Democrat successor, Angela Merkel—has all but collapsed as the parties sail only into the safest electoral havens. The lack of ideological ferment in Germany has echoes in Britain. In both countries, the think tanks that in the mid-1990s were brave new worlds of ideas are today quieter, less radical. One reason: political parties, armed with focus groups and other sophisticated tools with which to read the voters, are more reactive than proactive. "It's the tyranny of the 'average voter,' and it leads to short-term policies," said Lars Nord, a Swedish political scientist. "Parties are becoming really smart about feeling out the voters, but more scared of leading."