September 25, 2024 - 1:15pm
The decline of social democracy is a well-known trend. What’s less obvious — but increasingly undeniable — is that the rot has spread far beyond the conventional centre-left. Europeans now are turning their backs on just about every shade of progressive politics.
In Germany, the co-leaders of the Greens — Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang — have just announced their joint resignation. Supposedly, the most powerful green party in Europe, it is losing votes fast: having been wiped out in recent regional elections, a national poll has just put the Greens below 10% of the popular vote. Meanwhile, the Left-wing Die Linke is heading for extinction.
In the 2010s, there were great hopes that radical parties such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece could tap into anti-establishment feeling and provide an alternative to Right-wing populism. Today, however, Podemos is a shattered fragment, while Syriza has seen its support fall to a new low. In the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein has crashed from first to third place. And in Britain, the Corbynites were first befriended by Keir Starmer — then ruthlessly purged.
In the 2019 European elections there was a “green wave”, with various parties of the environmentalist Left making gains. Now, though, it’s a different story. Green parties aren’t shrivelling away everywhere, but across the EU the general trend is one of decline. Germany is just the most dramatic example.
Moving to the centre does not appear to be a successful strategy for the Left either. The most important contemporary example of this is Emmanuel Macron: formerly a socialist, he formed his own moderate movement and, for a while, conquered all before him. Yet now he has been press-ganged into appointing a conservative prime minister — by Marine Le Pen of all people.
As for the remaining French Left — the four-party New Popular Front — recent events have only exposed their essential powerlessness. Used by Macron to save his skin in this year’s parliamentary elections, he’s now mugged them off, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Even when the Left “wins”, it loses.
In Denmark, Left unity has failed in a different way. For decades, a red bloc and a blue bloc fought each other at elections and alternated in government. However, the biggest of the red bloc parties now governs in coalition with two centre-right parties. Though she’s a social democrat, Mette Frederiksen knows that she owes her position as PM to her hard line on immigration, which is easier to pursue without the rest of the Left.
Just about the only way that Left-wing parties prosper in Europe these days is when they break with progressive positions and adopt a “Left conservative” stance. Germany’s BSW is a prominent example of this formula, as are the governing Smer and Hlas parties in Slovakia. But, as such, they’re now estranged from their former socialist and social democrat comrades.
No matter which form the progressive Left takes in Europe, it is — almost everywhere — out of power or heading for defeat. Even the Czech Pirate Party, the nearest thing to a Left-wing party in the Czech parliament, has just resigned from government after a crushing defeat in regional elections.
Faced with the decline and disaffection of the European working class, progressive politicians thought they could build new, and much cooler, coalitions. Evidently, they thought wrong.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeIt’s about time.
If your Unique Selling Point is to spearhead division but talk up togetherness then eventually you run out of excuses.
Literally none of their policies work. Net Zero is destroying the economies of Europe. Mass migration from the Islamic world is making housing unaffordable, depleting public services, and making the cities unlivable. Lavish welfare benefits and high taxes have killed economic growth, which in turn has caused birth rates to plummet. Add in some sterilization and mutilation of gay and autistic kids, and it looks more and more like a civilizational suicide pact.
If the voters don’t reject that devil’s cocktail, they’re insane.
Absolutely this. People are voting out batshit crazy. Starmer will feel the wrath soon. The Dems might win the election in the U.S. – thanks to a weak candidate like Trump and its foot soldiers in the regime media – but the same fate awaits them.
The “thank god we got rid of the senile old fool bounce” Kamala got is long since over. It won’t be long before Trump is ahead virtually everywhere.
Already happening. He gains about 1 pt per week as Kamala fumbles softball interviews and her own words are plastered all over TV by the Trump team.
Of course, Trump never fumbles an interview. He focusses on the real issues, like immigrants eating cats, and ….um….Hannibal Lecter.
The Democrats will win only if they cheat. But that’s their MO since JFK.
Replace Democrats with Republicans in your silly mini-rant. then you will have it right.
Very recent mainstream polls are starting to show Trump pulling ahead. Given his historically underrated poll performance, the fact he’s showing ahead makes a blowout possible.
The Italian PM Meloni just called the banning of fossil fuel engines after 2035 “self destructive”. The crazy green policies are already deindustrialising Germany, and Europe is finally waking up, what NetZero means for their vital industries and prosperity. Here in Britain Miliband is starting to destroy, what’s left of its industry with his strategy of relying on renewables, his insane idea of floating windmills and forcing the car manufacturers to sell only EVs by 2030. It seems Britain has begun its “Road to Serfdom” with the government controlling all economic decision making. NetZero will be finally the end of wealth and prosperity for the West, unless people come to their senses and resist this madness.
How will the people resist? The main TV channels don’t even discuss NetZero – it is a given. Children are being taught every day about the importance of NetZero. If there were organised demos, Two-Tier’s thought police would close them down. Yes, there is UnHerd but it is minute in effect – the key politicians just shake off other views by shouting, “Fasc**ts”.
The present government is in every way totalitarian. All other views are suppressed. GBNews will probably be shut down by OffCom. I think that even UnHerd will be closed down at some point. Depressing but what is the answer?
I think we shouldn‘t be too pessimistic. All the State run broadcasting organisations and MSM are shedding viewers/readers. Even with their green indoctrinations in schools, recent elections in Germany showed, that young people abandoned voting for the Green Party. It seems that mostly older people were still voting “Green”.
Funnily the Green Party wanted to give voting rights to 16 year olds, expecting a huge increase in potential voters. Opinion Polls showed that even this very young group is sick and tired of the German Green Party, and many said they would give their potential vote to the AfD…
Most people nowadays, especially the young, are getting their info from internet bloggers. I get my news from Substack, Public or independent internet magazines.
The regime media still has sway with voters who are not engaged. That’s the problem.
Worse still are the “partially engaged”. They just consume the high-level memes trotted out by their “tribes” on the prevailing MSM and repeat them (unanalysed) to others.
Yes, and the other issue, at least in Europe is the EU itself, which is of course not subject to the desires of, well, any electorate and is stuffed to bursting with authoritarian, progressive, eco-loon, net zero types. Only the other day Mario Draghi was calling for the creation of an EU super fund of €800bn to power a new “industrial strategy” for europe . . . I’m sure that would save the day . . .
Wow! Policies devised by people who’ve never been outside the state education system and implemented by politicians with no experience outside politics don’t work!?
I’m shocked! Truly I am.
Succinctly and well put.
That’s not a list of left policies! Net Zero is an established framework in most countries, there are some right-left issues therein but the main issues are other. Mass migration doesn’t exist anywhere and I don’t know of any political groups that advocate mass Islamic migration anywhere. Lavish welfare benefits mean what when existing benefits are inadequate and continually underlined, putting society and economy at risk? Taxes are always too high for those who can’t or won’t pay, two very different issues. The current UK structure of taxes weighs too much on economic process and not enough on results: cut VAT, treat income and capital gains equally, reduce taxes on employment while taxing profits and wealth gently is just common sense not right or left.
Excessive use of state power is right wing not left.
That right? Try reading the Twitter Files, for starters.
Excessive use of state power is right wing
Yes, it has been. But the left are playing that game now and far more aggressively,
Unfortunately, most voters are still voting for parties with the insane policies you listed.
Mostly, like in uk, because both major parties and LibDem persued the same policies, so there was no alternative.
Part of the problem is that setting up alternative party with viable candidates and policies is hard.
Mostly because of alliance of woke lefties in academia, media, legal system and civil service with globalist big business.
Business after cheap immigrant labour and both after destruction of cohesive Western societies, so elites can rule unhindered by democracy.
It’s not just that they policies are wrong (that describes the late 90s early 2000s where parties had “different strategies to reach the same goal”), it’s that leftist disintegrationist policy is anti-true. It exacerbates it even causes the problems they are concerned with.
Getting it wrong cause sub optimal results. Anti true policies tears things apart.
Good. It seems the voters have finally learned that Utopia is not to be found on this earth, that no nation can tax its way to prosperity by perpetually soaking “the rich,” that the green scam is, in fact, a scam, and that people can only be separated into victims and victimizers.
At some point, people expect words to be reflected in deeds. All they have seen from the left is endless attempts to divide. By race, by sex, by religion, by ethnicity, or by viewpoint on some issue. I cannot speak for the European left but its American counterpart has never been anything more than a coalition of single-interest groups united by a common belief that govt always knows best and that coercion is okay.
If the left actually did soak the rich a bit I wouldn’t mind so much. In reality, it’s the lower middle and working class that always ends being bled dry.
In the US the lower classes get hurt by policies that add costs to energy and food, but the top few % pay an inordinate portion of the taxes.
“costs to energy and food”. The cost of food will grow up regardless due to climate change. Not a right or left issue unless you complaint is with physics.
Maybe if progressives had tempered their idealism with more pragmatism and tried the art of persuasion rather than lecturing, bulling, smearing and ignoring people who disagreed with their lofty yet often impractical idea(l)s then they wouldn’t be floundering right now. Failure to do that just turns you into an irrelevant fringe group pushing unrealistic, luxury beliefs.
Will be interesting to see whether parties like the German Greens will actually learn from this and change or whether they will choose to become martyrs, falling on their (100% organic and sustainably sourced) sword with a grand cry of “THEY JUST DIDN’T UNDERSTAAAAAAAAND!”
I don’t think the thwarted left have resurrected the idea of “false consciousness” again yet.
Wikipedia:
Popular in left wing circles long enough ago for there to be fresh set of believers to indoctrinate. This time it will be different.
The policies which would gain the Left genuine popular support are obvious to everyone, but unthinkable in the elite networks which make up the leftist political class. Anyone who would point out the obvious gets hurled into the void – no political career, and no good life after politics. The dirt people who would raise these concerns are no longer welcome in professional politics. We can see the same broad thing on the Right. Thus, nothing will happen until things break down further.
One can only hope.
The BSW in Germany is marking out a new path for socialist politics. Similar parties and tendencies elsewhere in Western Europe are sure to come along soon.
Apart from being against immigration their economic policies are nonsense.
Only appealing to Ossie morons who despite experience of communist DDR somehow believe in power of the state to sort their lives out.
Pathetic.
What was interesting in the recent German elections was that a far left start up party that was anti immigration did amazingly well.
Perhaps the message is (and I wish the UK far left government would get it), the people who you are supposed to be serving will turn against you regardless of whether you are left or right, if you don’t put them ahead of a load of foreigners who have no right to be there.
But BSW only did well in former East Germany.
Her support national is below 5%.
Her economic policies are insane.
Her appeasement of Putin makes her another Russian stooge like Merkel.
Joining DDR commies in 1989 when other slaves in East Germany protested against it tells you all you need to know about her.
I think this story misses the point. The left has put everything on the global warming horse (or rather they have hysterized themselves into it) and by doing that, they have been coopted by the globalists. Suddenly, the left was pro war, pro censorship and pro globalism. Just because the great reset plans of the WEF prominently included fighting climate change. Now they find themselves in a position where the globalists’ agenda becomes increasingly unpopular as more and more people stop listening to the propaganda machine, and that is what makes the left traitors so unpopular. That’s it and there is absolutely no way to get out of it, since the globalists have recently begun to paint zebra crossings in progressivist rainbow colors. So sad, lol.
Probably because current leftism/progressivism is just a superficial hotchpotch of fashionable luxury beliefs, representing bourgeois and elite class instability during the last dying breath of neoliberalism
The German BSW are not in any way conservative.They are National Bolscheviks,a huge difference!
Actually, lots of left political activity with growing support in different countries. And it’s clear that’s growing particularly where the threat of the far right is greater. What’s lacking is meaningful left unity, that’s what to focus on, distinguishing between the differentiation typical of popular- base democratic movements and the divisions introduced by capitalist interests capturing social democratic parties by one means or another, especially when governing or close to it.
“Europeans now are turning their backs on just about every shade of progressive politics.”
The question is whether the Left’s mindless and willful destruction of the very culture that sustains it has gone too far to be reversed. They may have killed us all with their pathological self hatred.
All I can add is ” Yes, Grazie a Dio”, but not, sadly, in The Petit Bourgeois Republic of Nu Britn- Draconia”….
Macron was in reality mugged by Olivier Faure who refused to support the left-ish Cazeneuve as PM – in order to maintain his own party’s unholy (and wholly self destructive) alliance with the vile Melenchonista far-left. That left Macron with no choice but to move with the right – and funnily Barnier’s appointment is often seen in France as a rather canny indeed brilliant move… Lots of things can go wrong but if you want France and liberal Europe to succeed you don’t have much choice but to back this lot…
The Left is facing extinction across the world.
The sheeple have awoken.
The Left’s stubborn attachment (dependence) on woke causes, their anti-prosperity and anti-human-flourishing platforms, their victimhood cheersquad and their tendency to cancel anyone who challenges them…….has lost them respect worldwised
It will be a Trump victory in the US and a right centrist party victory in Australia in 2025.
The world’s citizens wants a job, not a handout.
They want to get on with thriving, not endure yet another lecture about NetZero and climate change fairytale nonsense.
Ethnic nationalism. An enemy to hate. Glorifying military means to achieve objectives. Authoritarian tendencies.
Sinn Fein is more fascist than left wing.
The problem with Europe is that it mostly uses proportional representation, so “power” is generally a matter of forming an appropriate coalition. That isn’t generally a problem in Britain and other “Westminster” countries, where either “one lot” or “the other lot” wins.
Except, in Australia, where it comes to the Senate where the government needs to make deals to get legislation through.
True, but it is (as in Britain) a rare situation when a party doesn’t have a majority in the lower house, and has to rely on the crossbench to form a government.
The Left needs to abandon its support for uncontrolled globalisation and to end its support for the US/NATO (including the Ukraine War and Israel) and for wokery in its many manifestations. As a senior lefty I know once said to me about wokery, it is No. 49 on a list of 50 things that a left-wing party has to address. Nos. 1-48 are about jobs, incomes, privatisation v state ownership, the health service, infrastructure, crime, immigration, war, NATO, US imperialism, etc., etc. Important stuff. Sinn Fein is a national movement party and is therefore, by definition, on the right of the political spectrum. Which is OK. How far to the right it is, is of course an interesting question.
Interesting that the trend away from the traditional ‘Left’ as it has been understood until now is exemplified by two women, Mette Frederiksen PM of Denmark and Sahra Wagenknecht the leader of the German party which she has named after herself. They are both pursuing ‘Left conservatism’.