The morning after the night before, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was either defiant or in denial. The veteran Danish center-leftist and former prime minister heads the PES, or Party of European Socialists, that groups all the mainstream social democratic movements of the EU.
“To those who announce a profound crisis in European socialism,” he declared on Monday, “I say no.”
To EU-watchers, political scientists and pollsters, Rasmussen is inhabiting a parallel world. The heartlands of traditional fidelity to the center-left — northern Britain, the cities of the Netherlands, the factory towns of western Germany — have just fallen to a variety of rivals: the far right, the Greens, the Christian democrats and the liberals.
The wretched performances of such champions of mass political progress over the past century as the German Social Democratic party, the Dutch Labour party, and the British Labour party were writ large. Rasmussen blamed the public.
“Our voters stayed away. They simply didn’t see the relevance of these elections. They did not see the political choices at European level ... we had a European alternative, but it was not visible enough,” he said.
This reaction to the catastrophic results for the center-left in the four-day, 27-country election that ended on Sunday night was dismissed by politicians and experts not necessarily unsympathetic.
“The social democrats have suffered a spectacular collapse,” said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German Greens leader who was one of the few center-left victors in the ballot, leading the French Greens to within spitting distance of the French socialists.
“This is a meltdown for the center-left,” said Simon Hix of the London School of Economics, who has been running an EU-wide poll-tracking project for the election. Hugo Brady of the Center for European Reform said: “There is a structural crisis for the center-left, whether they are unpopular incumbents or in opposition. They have been routed.”
Given voter anxiety and anger at the misdemeanors of bankers, rising joblessness, failing mortgages and a worsening economic crisis, there were expectations that voters would lash out at incumbent governments, blaming them. This would have disproportionately hit the center-right parties dominating the countries of the EU, the European parliament and the political appointees running the European commission. It did happen to a small degree. But center-left governments in power in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Austria suffered much bigger losses — the Hungarian socialists, the Austrian social democrats and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour slumping to historic lows.
And there was no refuge in opposition. French, Italian and Polish social democrats were thrashed. The two social democratic parties that are junior coalition partners in the Netherlands and Germany also returned their worst ever results.
“The center-right won the election, but it [their vote] did not really go up,” Hix said. “It’s the center-left that has gone down, in government or in opposition.”
The balance of power in the chamber in Strasbourg and Brussels has now shifted, widening the gap between the two big groupings of the center-right and center-left to up to 100 seats, from 70, but with the right further buttressed by new factions of Euroskeptics and extreme rightwingers.
Wherever the center-left collapsed, the extreme right frequently scored its most spectacular gains — in Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. But pro-EU left liberals and Greens also did well.
Hix’s analysis is that the poor working-class white vote is going from social democrats to the anti-immigrant extreme right in the Netherlands, Britain or Austria, while middle-class liberals and public sector workers who also used to vote center-left are turning to the Greens.
“It’s a timebomb for the left. The white under-class is really feeling the pinch. They are the first to lose their jobs. The rhetoric from the extremists is frightening, but it sounds reasonable to them,” he said.
The mainstream governing parties of the right, meanwhile, are playing it safe in a time of crisis and reaping support. They are launching huge public spending programs and putting their countries first, as in France and Germany, in the attempt to save jobs or cushion the impact of unemployment, through generous welfare systems, short-time working, longer paid time off work and subsidized jobs.
“The center-left bought into capitalism a long time ago and now don’t have anything new to say,” Brady said. ”The center-right is a safe pair of hands. Voters don’t want a revolution. They want the party that will get them out of trouble or keep things stable until they get better.”
The usual labels can also be misleading. A summit of European leaders next week in Brussels, for example, will see German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy challenging Brown to agree to tighter regulation of Europe’s financial markets. Brown will resist, to defend the City of London from EU intrusiveness. The mainstream center-right leaders of Europe are often to the left of British Labour prime ministers.
The same summit next week, for example, will endorse President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso for another five-year term. The social democrats have ducked the question of putting up a challenger. Given this avoidance of political conflict, it is the Greens, who gained 10 more seats in the parliament, who are trying to upset the status quo.
“The big question for the Greens is how to build an opposition coalition to Barroso’s reappointment,” Cohn-Bendit said yesterday. “We can’t afford a repeat of his leadership and policies.”
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