Europe’s established left is facing the threat of extinction. In less than two years, the continent’s social-democratic parties have suffered historic losses in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. On a continent long defined by democratic competition between center-right and center-left parties, the collapse of the left could have far-reaching consequences, beyond particular party interests.
Many factors underlie the left’s decline, including the dissolution of the traditional working class.
However, one of the most important reasons is as grim as it is simple: European voters are increasingly opposed to immigration and do not trust the left to limit it.
Faced with a sustained influx of refugees and migrants, primarily from the Middle East and Africa, European voters have transformed a series of recent elections into popular referenda on immigration. Right-wing populist movements have skillfully played on blue-collar voters’ fears by convincing them that traditional labor parties would allow immigrants to flow in virtually unchecked.
In April, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won a landslide election victory after running a campaign that focused on the “threat” to “Christian values” supposedly posed by Muslim immigrants. Italy’s new anti-establishment coalition government was propelled to power by the popularity of the staunchly anti-immigrant League party, led by Matteo Salvini, who is now minister of the interior and deputy prime minister.
In Slovenia, former prime minister Janez Jansa’s right-wing opposition party secured just less than 25 percent of the vote in this month’s parliamentary election, meaning that Jansa is to form the country’s next government.
When right-wing populists first started gaining political traction, Europe’s center-left parties hoped that their traditional strengths would enable them to weather the challenge.
To avoid unwittingly strengthening right-wing narratives, center-left campaigners attempted to shift public debate toward their ideological comfort zone: unemployment, inequality and social justice. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) based its entire election campaign last year on the slogan “It’s time for more justice.”
Yet defeat after painful defeat has driven center-left parties to a stark realization: Voters who are concerned primarily with immigration are not going to be won over with calls for equality.
In Germany, the coalition government (comprising the SPD, the Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union) is embroiled in a bitter fight over immigration that threatens the survival of the coalition.
While the SPD aims for a European solution and rejects sealing Germany’s borders, party leader Andrea Nahles called for accelerated asylum procedures that would enable authorities to conclude asylum applications from safe third countries within one week.
Last month, Nahles launched the debate within the SPD when, seemingly echoing right-wing rhetoric, she said that Germany “cannot accept all.”
Some in the SPD’s leadership and its youth wing were up in arms. Yet Nahles has doubled down on her stance, publicly endorsing a critical analysis, compiled by a board of independent observers, of last year’s election defeat.
That report identified “the lack of a consistent social-democratic position” on migration issues as one of the party’s structural weaknesses.
The Social Democratic Party of Austria has taken its shift on immigration further. The party leadership has presented a new platform, to be officially endorsed later this year, that formally redefines the party’s position as “pro-integration,” as opposed to pro-migration.
While the platform does refer to the country’s “humanitarian responsibilities,” it also demands “functioning protection” of the EU’s external borders.
The criticism highlights a key challenge. On one level, social democrats’ immigration shift is a necessary response to voter demand. Efforts to limit or manage migration are not necessarily based on racism or xenophobia. The key is to ensure that policy responses remain morally acceptable.
At the same time, too drastic a change could be self-defeating for struggling center-left parties. They clearly cannot copy the crude nativist recipes of the radical right, which would not only be economically counterproductive, but would also fly in the face of progressive values, alienating cosmopolitan supporters.
Instead, Europe’s center-left parties should strike a balance between national and international solidarity with a three-pronged strategy comprising effective limits on immigration, a focus on integration and humanitarian efforts to ease large-scale human suffering.
Such an approach would eschew incendiary rhetoric, and instead offer real, forward-thinking and morally sustainable solutions that are not populist, but certainly can be popular.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has embraced this approach, as has French President Emmanuel Macron.
Struggling center-left parties across Europe should follow suit, recognizing that such a repositioning might well be the key to political survival.
Michael Broning is head of the international policy department of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a political foundation affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The world has become less predictable, less rules-based, and more shaped by the impulses of strongmen and short-term dealmaking. Nowhere is this more consequential than in East Asia, where the fate of democratic Taiwan hinges on how global powers manage — or mismanage — tensions with an increasingly assertive China. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has deepened the global uncertainty, with his erratic, highly personalized foreign-policy approach unsettling allies and adversaries alike. Trump appears to treat foreign policy like a reality show. Yet, paradoxically, the global unpredictability may offer Taiwan unexpected deterrence. For China, the risk of provoking the
Eating at a breakfast shop the other day, I turned to an old man sitting at the table next to mine. “Hey, did you hear that the Legislative Yuan passed a bill to give everyone NT$10,000 [US$340]?” I said, pointing to a newspaper headline. The old man cursed, then said: “Yeah, the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] canceled the NT$100 billion subsidy for Taiwan Power Co and announced they would give everyone NT$10,000 instead. “Nice. Now they are saying that if electricity prices go up, we can just use that cash to pay for it,” he said. “I have no time for drivel like
Young supporters of former Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) were detained for posting the names and photographs of judges and prosecutors believed to be overseeing the Core Pacific City redevelopment corruption case. The supporters should be held responsible for their actions. As for Ko’s successor, TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), he should reflect on whether his own comments are provocative and whether his statements might be misunderstood. Huang needs to apologize to the public and the judiciary. In the article, “Why does sorry seem to be the hardest word?” the late political commentator Nan Fang Shuo (南方朔) wrote
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) reportedly told the EU’s top diplomat that China does not want Russia to lose in Ukraine, because the US could shift its focus to countering Beijing. Wang made the comment while meeting with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas on July 2 at the 13th China-EU High-Level Strategic Dialogue in Brussels, the South China Morning Post and CNN reported. Although contrary to China’s claim of neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, such a frank remark suggests Beijing might prefer a protracted war to keep the US from focusing on
RSS