What happened to the Left's moment?

Across Europe, social democratic parties are in retreat, as parties of the right advance. Failures of leadership are to blame.

Were you up for Nick Griffin? Probably not. By the time that the grim news of the election of the BNP leader to the European Parliament was confirmed, most of his compatriots were in bed. The consequences of the results for politics in this country are momentous and disturbing. Following the outcome was, nevertheless, a distinctly minority pursuit. Yet if few were watching the battle between the British parties, this number still dwarfed the number taking an interest in the trends across Europe. This is understandable. Staying up until 2am to check if the Romanian exit polls were vindicated is idiosyncratic behaviour. But those few who made the effort were rewarded. For the trends across Europe in the elections turned out to be striking. This should have been the Centre Left's big moment. And yet it wasn't. While British voters marvel at, for instance, Labour's collapse in Wales, and view with disgust the rise of the neo-Nazi Andrew Brons, a bigger question still arises. Why did the Centre Left fail? For fail it did. In France the result for the Centre Left was not much less disastrous than it was in Britain. The Italian Centre Left did poorly, and so did the Spanish. And in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands there was failure too. By contrast, the Centre Right - and sadly the far Right too - has done well. The timing makes the result particularly remarkable. The social democratic Left arose as a response to the instability of capitalism. It built its organisational base by providing workers with the industrial muscle to protect their wages in bad economic times; it based its political appeal on its offer to maintain full employment as an alternative to capitalist instability; and its main intellectual contribution was to provide ideas that might help to save capitalism from itself - Keynesian economics and redistributive welfare policy. The recent financial crisis has thus reproduced many of the conditions that brought social democracy into being. And it made the case for liberal economic purity harder to make. In such circumstances, there are four possible explanations for the electoral failure of the Centre Left. The first is that European electorates chose to send a resounding message to people at the Fabian Society not to muck about with their beloved neoliberal capitalism. This seems unlikely. The second, more credible, explanation is that in difficult economic times parties promoting prudent spending and lower taxes tend to do better. A third explanation is that the Left in general has not offered a coherent alternative to the market economics that it says has failed. There is certainly truth in this. Yet in the United States, conservatives are retreating as a self-confident Centre Left captures the public mood.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6458415.ece