Staying Safe in the Middle of the Road

If politics has moved from macro ideas to micro ones, as Oliver Marc Hartwich of the think tank Policy Exchange in London argues, it's in part because the policy heavy-lifting was done in past decades. Since then a comfortable political consensus has settled over the landscape. Thus, the "cradle to grave" National Health Service, born during the postwar British government of Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, is today embraced by both Labour and the Conservatives; similarly, the mainstream parties of the Nordic countries now accept the economic liberalism promulgated by Thatcher. Reflecting on Danish politics, Jorgen Goul Andersen of Aalborg University could just as well be talking about Europe's northern tier generally when he says, "It reminds me a bit of the 1960s, when there was political consensus on welfare politics. Then there were the crises of the '70s and '80s, [which were] righted by neoliberal solutions. Now there are no real big challenges in Danish politics. They took care of social issues in good time, like other proactive Scandinavian nations."

A similar consensus thrives in Central Europe. But it's less homegrown than imposed from the outside, stemming from the collapse of communism and the keenness, even desperation, of former Soviet-bloc countries to join the European Union. Such is their eagerness that they have been willing to revamp their social, economic and legal systems to pass the test. "The post-communist countries had to achieve the same radical reform goals [as their Western neighbors] under the guidance of the EU," says Jiri Pehe, director of New York University's Prague campus, and a onetime adviser to former Czech president Vaclav Havel. This was not a partisan exercise. "It did not matter which party carried them out," Pehe says.

The pull of the political center affects different countries in different ways. In Spain, with four months to go before the next election, the mainstream parties are in broad agreement on economic policy, but have scrapped over social issues such as same-sex marriage and divorce, as well as the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Spanish life. In Portugal, partisan differences seem even narrower: the big debate these days is over where to build the new Lisbon airport. In Italy, centrism has pulled off a coup—bringing something like coherence to a land of impossibly fractious politics and notoriously weak governments. The newish Democratic Party has managed to gather lefties, ex-communists, former Christian Democrats, Greens and Liberal Democrats under its big tent. The party may be led by a former Communist Party member, Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, but it seeks to be market-friendly and advocates further liberalization of the Italian economy. Luca Comodo of the polling firm Ipsos says the move to the political center is in part a response to the public's demand "for a simplification of the political scenario, for clearer political programs, for a stronger ability to govern and a stronger capacity to take decisions."

As the Italian case suggests—and as France's recent chaos drives home—the political center is not always such a bad place to be. The radicalism of a Thatcher or, for that matter, of a Sarkozy comes at times of change, uncertainty or economic malaise. The gravitational force of the center is greatest when people feel comfortable and prosperous. The task for those political thinkers who have traveled to the center in the past is to make sure the politics there don't go stale. "I'm puzzling about this myself," says the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, the intellectual godfather of the Third Way, which, as mocked as it came to be, was at the heart of center-left thinking in the 1990s. Gazing across the politics of Europe today, he accepts that there is the danger of former left and right parties merging into a single party of the center. "You have to ask yourself: is there a one-party system at the center of democracy today?"

The challenge is to redefine the center—to find what Giddens and Tony Blair used to call the "radical center." "You need a new wave of analysis," says Giddens. He suggests that all this cross-party consensus doesn't necessarily translate into paralysis—you can have a radical, bipartisan consensus on climate change, for example. One thing is clear: in the wonkish policy workshops of the former left and right, the fight over the center will be over a narrow ideological ground as long as large numbers of key voters still reside there. "Many of the issues we were tackling [a decade ago] have been tackled," says British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who in the early Blair years ran the prime minister's policy unit. "We have to refashion a progressive political narrative for new times. That's what we had to do in the 1990s, and [that's what] we'll do now." The idea of a "refashioned progressive political narrative" is political jargon enough to set one's teeth on edge. But if a successful refashioning of the political landscape helps remove the muddle from the political middle, perhaps it will be worth the pain.

With Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, Mike Elkin in Madrid, Charles Ferro in Copenhagen, Sophie Grove in London, Katka Krosnar in Prague, Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Karin Rives in Stockholm and Andreas Tzortzis in Berlin

© 2007