Only a handful of European states are currently governed by left-wing governments, and several of the traditionally largest left-wing parties, such as the Socialist Party in France, have experienced substantial drops in support. Jan Rovny argues that while many commentators have linked the left’s decline to the late-2000s financial crisis, the weakening of Europe’s left reflects deep structural and technological changes that have reshaped European society, leaving left-wing parties out in the cold.
Last year was an ‘annus horribilis’ for the European left. In Austria, France, and the Czech Republic, the left lost its governing position, and the same might occur in Italy in a few weeks. Today, only Portugal, Greece, Sweden, Slovakia, and Malta are governed by the left. The 2017 collapse was precipitous. The Dutch Workers’ party went from roughly 25% to 6%; the French Socialist Party went from roughly 30% to 7%. The Czech Social Democrats went from 20% to 7%. And the Czech Communist party saw its worst result in its almost 100-year history.
It may be tempting to connect the failure of the European left to the recent economic recession. It was during this recession or its aftermath that many left-wing governments (in Britain, Spain, Denmark) lost their mandates. Undeniably, the recession with its massive social cost caused much electoral instability, and opened a political door to various populist challengers. It would be, however, naive to suggest that the economic crisis was anything other than a catalyst. It was an accelerator that speeded up the onset of consequences of a structural development that we have been witnessing for at least three decades.
The weakening of the political left has been long in the making. It has been largely caused by deep structural and technological change that has altered the face of European societies, changed the economic patterns of the continent, and given a renewed vigour to politics of identity. In this process, traditional left-wing parties have lost not only the grasp of their main political narrative, they have lost much of their traditional electorates. These electorates did not so much ‘switch’ away from the left, they have rather disappeared as a comprehensible social group.
What was left behind?
Let us start at the beginning by asking what was the European left in its heyday. The defining characteristic of the post-war European left (which was distinct from the eastern European left of the time) was the democratic fight for the rights of working people. Shortly after the Second World War, most of the mainstream European left rejected Communism, and accepted a democratic path towards the emancipation and support of the working class. During the golden age of post-war development, the left participated in the construction of European welfare regimes, and where it has been most successful – in Scandinavia – it built up universalistic, egalitarian, and predominantly tax-funded and state-run systems of welfare provision.
In this construction, the parties of the left have primarily leaned on a significant and relatively homogenous group of working class electorates. These electorates were since the late 19th century defined by a strong sense of group belonging, or ‘class consciousness’. This consciousness was constructed from the cradle and lasted to the grave. It was passed on from parents to children, and cultivated by a plethora of party-associated organisations, such as daycare centres, sports clubs, choral societies, women’s clubs, and others. Together with workers’ unions organising the work on factory floors, and later in offices, these organisations helped construct a working-class subculture that permeated the social as well as the political, and that ensured the electoral stability of the European left.
Seymour Martin Lipset suggested that the greatest achievement of the left had been the lifting of the working class away from authoritarianism and towards cosmopolitanism espoused by left-wing intellectuals. Indeed, the general success of the left in capturing and ‘educating’ the lower social strata profoundly shaped European party systems. In western Europe, the political left has been uniformly and continuously associated with progressive policies not only in the economic domain, but also in non-economic matters such as the environment, women’s rights, and (slowly and shyly) the rights of minorities – both ethnic and sexual.
Somewhat paradoxically, the left’s success precipitated its own demise in a dialectic fashion. First, the emancipation of the working class – primarily the extension of access to higher education – changed the working class and its dependence on left-wing subcultures and organisations. Second, the left’s enabling of the search for rights allowed younger generations to seek personal liberation from traditional hierarchies, including those of the left.
From proletariat to ‘precariat’
Having lived in Gothenburg, Sweden, the home of the Volvo, I eagerly visited the Volvo factory, looking forward to meeting the contemporary proletariat. What did I see? Halls and halls of conveyor belts shuffling skeletons that would become fancy SUVs in about an hour, while silver robotic arms added various parts to them. And the working class? I saw precious few of them. They were mostly young women, sitting on comfortable chairs surrounded by computer screens and keyboards, listening to their iPods… I later learned that these workers earn as much as Swedish university professors (that means – a lot).
The traditional working class as we imagine it from the times of Henry Ford does not exist anymore. Most of the workers at Volvo with their above-average pay, comfort and job security can hardly be considered as such. Today’s working class is much less visible, and much more atomised. Today’s working class are the masses of unskilled service workers who predominantly cook, clean or drive. Often, their jobs are short-term or part-time, and low-paying. These people do not come into contact with each other nearly as much as the traditional factory-floor workers did. They are more often than not from diverse minority backgrounds, and thus are separated by cultural boundaries. In short, these people have significantly reduced ability to organise, and they do not. As my research with Allison Rovny shows, their political belonging is weak, and – in the absence of a formative subculture – it is malleable.
The extension of access to higher education has increased the individual ability of people to process more complex information and make their own choices. As education also brings better jobs, this process has created more cognitively and financially independent citizens. The 1968 generation opted for more socially liberal and less hierarchical politics, forming new social movements and later political parties that espoused left-wing economics, but that were defined by their social and cultural openness.
In the context of the changing working class and the developing political supply, the traditional left parties became parties of the new middle class – primarily of the increasing numbers of white-collar state employees. In doing so, the traditional left responded to the Green challenge by adopting more environmental and generally socially liberal profiles, but also it slowly but surely abandoned the new ‘precariat’ – the new service working classes and those in poor or irregular employment. Politically pulled by social-liberalism (of the ‘new’ left), and by economic moderation to the centre (preferred by a new group of urban white-collar workers and ‘yuppies’), the traditional left opened a political breach – a gaping political vacuum around those seeking economic protection, and a certain cultural traditionalism. The salience of this left and traditionalist political space, vacated by the mainstream left parties, would be boosted by another important structural development – the growth of transnational exchange.
Transnational transformations
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a symbolic milestone, opening not just communist eastern Europe, but the entire developed world up to increased international exchange. My ongoing research with Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe and David Attewell shows that the three decades since have witnessed significant liberalisation of international trade, expressed in the formation of the WTO, and in the deepening of European integration, which has always practically centred around the free flow of goods, capital and people. The opening of European borders, as well as various conflicts on Europe’s doorstep and beyond, further increased migration into and within Europe.
The rise of transnationalism – of extensive cross-border flows of goods, services, money and people – is firstly an economic phenomenon. It replaces domestic products and labourers with cheaper foreign alternatives. Transnationalism thus divides society into those who, while happily consuming cheaper products, earn their income in either sheltered (public) or internationally competitive sectors on the one hand, and those, on the other hand, whose livelihood is threatened by foreign competition in the form of imported products, and imported labourers. Transnationalism thus creates economic winners and losers, who are increasingly keenly aware of their status in our globalised societies.
Transnationalism is, however, also a cultural phenomenon. While the privileged enjoy cross-border travel for business and pleasure on an unparalleled scale, they gain experiences, learn languages, build friendships and, on occasion, have found families across borders and cultures; those with limited financial, and educational means live in a world defined by national boundaries, customs, and language. The inflow of culturally distinct migrants into urban centres furthers this alienation. This opens a cultural chasm between the transnational cosmopolitans, concentrating in larger cities that increasingly embrace pluri-culturalism, and national traditionalists mostly present in smaller, peripheral localities, fearful of immigrants, and sceptical of their immigrant-accepting cosmopolitan co-nationals.
Transnationalism redefines the political space by dissociating economic progressivism from socio-cultural openness. Transnationalism associates cosmopolitanism with open economic exchange on the one side, and national traditionalism with economic protectionism on the other. In doing so, transnationalism effectively shatters the old electoral coalition of the left. The naturally protectionist workers are pulled away from the naturally cosmopolitan intellectuals. This brings us back to the great political void, to the question of who will represent the new ‘precariat’, seeking economic protection, and cultural traditionalism. Transnationalism also increases the salience of populist anti-elitism, as rural traditionalists feel unrepresented by, shunned by, and distinct from the largely urban, cosmopolitan elite. The populist call to the ‘common man’, is a call of economic and cultural protection against the transformations of transnationalism.
The left out
In shifting its focus to the new middle classes, the left let the new ‘precariat’ fall towards nationalist protectionism, where it became fertile ground for the populist radical right. The populist radical right has been around for a good while. First, as an anti-tax, anti-welfare critique of the left, but later, with the dawn of transnationalism, it tapped into the sensitive issue of immigration with game-changing vigour. Attracting a wide coalition of economic interests through its blurry economic proposals, as my earlier research shows, the radical right married its traditional petit bourgeois electorate to swaths of the new ‘precariat’, and outperformed the left as the dominant political voice of the contemporary working classes.
The transformation of the left, however, offers opportunities for diverse political entrepreneurs. As my forthcoming work with Jonathan Polk, as well as with Bruno Palier and Allison Rovny demonstrates, in countries that experienced particularly drastic economic downturn during the economic recession, such as Greece and Spain, and where the ‘precariat’ consequently includes many young and educated citizens, the populist challengers are mostly radical left parties that call for a return to true – economically interventionist, and culturally liberal – left-wing politics. In other places, populists eschewing comprehensible political labels gain electoral support largely through the votes of the ‘precarious’ left-behind.
The transformation of the proletariat into the ‘precariat’, together with the dawn of transnationalism, have reframed the political field. Post-war politics saw economic interests – primarily the extent and contours of the welfare state – as the dominant political contest that subsumed or largely ignored other, non-economic divides. The new politics of transnationalism promises to be a politics of identity, with the cleaving lines defined by ethno-national labels, as well as by the distinction between large urban centres and the rural periphery. As my work with Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe and David Attewell suggests, these divides may be as deep, sticky and formative, as were the traditional class lines of the 20th century. While these divides are as economically rooted, as they are cultural, the new political entrepreneurs will find it easier to frame their narratives in identity-based terms. We should thus expect to see economic issues couched in non-economic discourses of national and local identity.
This competition frame is foreign to traditional left-wing parties, whose identity was always rooted in economic class. They are facing a struggle to adapt to this changing dimensional structure. Recent presidential elections in France as well as in the Czech Republic demonstrate the shift, as both countries saw a leftish authoritarian opposed by a centrist liberal in the second round, while the traditional left imploded. Interestingly, in the context of this new political competition, the west resembles the east, and the mainstream left everywhere is left out in the cold.
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Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: © European Union 2013 – European Parliament (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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Jan Rovny – Sciences Po, Paris
Jan Rovny is an Assistant Professor at Sciences Po.
Excellent article. One detail I find is missed in the analysis of all this (not the author’s necessarily, but as a whole), is to what extent the established political left has become beholden to the kinds of moneyed interest it claims to be opposed to. The transition from an economic focus to an identarian focus in many left wing parties seems to correlate with the infusions of funding from those for whom a left wing economic focus would be inconvenient and unprofitable. There are also many hints of identarian “COintel” being used against grassroots left wing movements to derail and divide them – planting operatives in those movements to seed division based on race, gender and sexuality. Many members of the ‘Occupy’ movement have accounted a sudden influx of this at meetings – a shift in focus from the crimes of bankers and politicians to obsessive “oppression point scoring”, and subsequently many people walked away, and all momentum was lost shortly afterward.
Strange to still call “left” parties that are neoliberal. When their economic policies consist in giving more privileges to the wealthy, they habe no “left” left in them.
The fall of social-democracy lies in their treason of common people, leaving them with no electoral base.
Your narrative is flawed as it does not recognize this basic fact. You can use fancy words and sophisticated concepts, if you fail to grasp that the political field has been captured by the oligarchy, you miss the point.
Yes, this is true. Tony Blair was an especially notorious example of this with his “Nu-Labour” party that supported the war in Iraq, and also supported mass immigration that brought down the wages of the working class. Blair was a committed neoliberal globalist. In what world is this “liberal”? Blair tried to argue that his commitment to “diversity” and “multiculturalism” made his party leftist, but people saw through this and he wound up angering all sides of the political spectrum– traditional conservatives and moderates were furious at the cultural conflicts and loss of social cohesion from mass migration, particularly Muslim migration, while traditional liberals were angered by the wage-depressing effects.
Europe’s populits today are often called “Right” but that’s a bit of a misnomer. They do oppose mass immigration particularly from the Middle East and Africa where overpopulation is a problem, yes, and they do argue for social cohesion and cultural protection for Europe’s indigenous peoples. But on economic matters they support traditional social democratic policies like universal health care and affordable education. Neoliberal “faux leftists” like Tony Blair and NuLabour, or other multicultural mass migration promoters like Angela Merkel, betray both the traditional left (working class, unions, high wages) and the right (social cohesion, protection of Europe’s natives) with their support of mass migration, which is neoliberal crony capitalists’ favorite tool to depress wages. This is why Europe’s supposed leftists like Tony Blair–and to some extent also center-rightists like Merkel– are collapsing against the European populists.
The comment above is very simplistic. New Labour was successful despite I imagine being classified as a “neoliberal” party by these commenters. They were more left-wing with Miliband and Corbyn but still lost those two elections. They were much more lefty before Blair, but couldn’t win power.
If you look for answers to this by saying how neoliberal parties like Labour are we’re not going to come up with a sensible explanation for why left-wing parties struggle today in a way they didn’t in the past. This article is taking the explanation from changes in society, rather than the explanation of left-wing parties “selling out” their voters that you always hear said (especially by populist parties who love this idea) and I think that take is correct.
The left-wing party that was successful in the 60’s and 70’s doesn’t exist anymore and couldn’t possibly be successful today because it had its success rooted in a different type of society (one of unions, local organisations and communities which has barely any relevance to today’s society).
Good summary but …
How well does this narrative of social democrat decline hold up if you classify parties/governments by common policy standards, not party labels ?
Take one crude measure: state spending as proportion of GDP. In the UK its 37%, the “left” Labour proposals would have raised it to around 40% (IFS data), in Germany around 44%, Denmark 50%.
This narrative talks about social democracy losing out – but if you analyse it as common policies much of northern Europe, at least, remains firmly in the social democratic space.
The fall of the Socialist parties in Spain and France surely owes something to the their sagas of corruption and incompetence – and how do you classify Macron ? Social democrat, liberal (left would say neo-liberal but they say that of everyone who isn’t part of their faction) ?
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Poland, which is the “poster child” for your thesis. In Poland, The constantly growing support for the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) is substantially due to it promising and promptly implementing a very generous child benefit. While this may appear to be a social-democratic standard, but in fact in recent years left-wing parties have strongly supported increasing the provision and subsidy of daycare facilities rather than simply giving money to parents. It is interesting to compare how this issue has developed in Canada. In the early 2000’s, the liberal and social-democratic parties wanted to go the daycare route, but they were defeated by Conservatives, who increased direct child benefits. By 2015, the Liberals promised increased child benefits, and won the election (mainly for other reasons, of course). The approach to the question of supporting families with children is one which left-wing parties need to re-examine, since it exposes a fundamental difference in the way families are defined ideologically. The traditional one is that of mothers staying in the home, where possible relying on retired grandparents for assistance, while the “modern” one is of both parents working, sharing tasks equally and relying on institutional childcare facilities, with money going to employ daycare workers and funding their facilities. Thrown into this vision of family are the “gender diversity” issues, which appear to have gained enormous importance for left-wing movements. This issue connects with the “transnational mobility” questions, since several European countries are concerned with preserving their cultural identity and population in the future. Countries such as Canada and New Zealand, founded via mass migrations from many sources, have long ago de facto chosen to reproduce via immigration, while countries such as the Central European ones prefer not to, and hence their efforts to increase their birthrates via assistance to families and impeding access to birth control and abortion.
A good article. I would simply add, as a clarification, that the demise of Europe’s Left (its avowed radical Left as much as its centre-left) is above all a matter of hypocrisy and misguided policy with respect to mass immigration, embodied by the neoliberal betrayals of Tony Blair and NuLabour in Britain and his Continental counterparts. Blair called himself a Leftist, yet he pushed for British involvement in an imperial war i Iraq alongside the neocon President George W. Bush, clearly a betrayal of traditional Leftism in any country. Then on top of that, he became a committed Globalist on economics and migration. Big business and multinational companies love mass immigration because it provides cheap labour that depresses workers’ wages and, esp. when cultural conflicts arise, gets the working class fighting each other rather than the big capitalists, classic divide and conquer. Extreme libertarians also like mass immigration for similar reasons, since it reduces support for safety nets and social democratic protections like universal health care and public education.
Blair and NuLabour pushed for the biggest increase in mass migration in British history, which had a severe wage-depression effect for British workers. Blair tried to argue that his mass migration support was Leftist because it was an anti-racist policy supporting diversity and multiculturalism– “rubbing the Right’s noses in diversity” as his party called it. But the British working class, the Left’s traditional constituency, saw right through Blair’s claims. The result was that Blair and the “globalist neoliberal Leftists” wound up angering everyone across the spectrum–infuriating traditional conservatives and moderates alarmed at the danger to culture and social cohesion from mass immigration particularly from the Muslim Middle East and Africa (with their overpopulation crises posing a constant problem), yet also angering traditional liberals, trade unions and British poor and working class, who were hit hard by the wage depression from Blair’s mass immigration policies and Iraq War support. NuLabour delivered the worst of those both worlds and lost any constituency.
This effect has bee even more pronounced on the Continent since those countries don’t have Britain’s centuries-old First Past the Post system, with Parliamentary power-sharing being the norm, and populist parties are able to exert tremendous influence as a result. Although the populists are commonly labeled “Right”, this is misleading– they’re anti-globalist. This means they’re “right” in their strong opposition to mass immigration from outside the EU to preserve social cohesion and culture, but in other matters, they’re more like the traditional Left int heir support for social capitalist and social democratic standards like safety nets, universal health care, family parental leave, lower cost uni education and good national infrastructure, as well as populists’ opposition to expensive military interventions in the Middle East like Blair’s Iraq War. In fact it should be added that not only the European Left, but also Center-Right officials like Angela Merkel have also been declining severely in the face of the populists and for similar reasons, ex. Merkel’s support of mass Syrian and Afghan immigration that enraged both traditional conservatives and moderates for social reasons, as well as traditional leftists who just saw it as a cheap balour grab to undermine European wages. Every week Merkel’s hold on power falters more and more because of it. Even in the decreasing cases where traditional parties or independents (like Emmanuel Macron in France) have been able to hold on, it’s because they’ve largely adopted the populists’ policies in practice, such as Macron’s extremely tough security bill which in practice is an anti-immigration bill leading to deportations of Muslim and African migrants (or their further migration either back home or to ex. the UK, US or Canada). Neoliberal globalism, with its fondness for mass migration as a tool to push down wages and social cohesion, is a disastrous political strategy that’s doomed the European Left and will do the same for any center-right parties that support it.
Almost a year has given some perspective, and exposure to new results and ideas. In March, Thomas Piketty put out a paper on voting patterns, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017)”, which showed that the changes in party allegiance discussed in the article above had been developing since about 1960. I was a bit surprised that Jan Rovny and his colleagues did not refer to the economic inequality work of Milanovic, and of Piketty in “Capital”, as popularised by Mark Blyth and Thomas Frank, and the concept of “Somewheres” versus “Anywheres” in David Goodhart’s book, “The Road to Somewhere” (2017). These all cover the same ground as Rovny and colleagues, and perhaps our understanding of it all is getting better.
I have a nagging thought that the two “sides” of this equation are pretty evenly split, and that we may not be too far from the liberal “Anywhere”/”GAL” side prevailing demographically over the “Somewhere”/”TAM” side, despite the pauperisation of the middle class and the growth of the precarious gig economy.The Democrats in the US have been hoping in vain for this to happen, but their problem is now clearly in the excess weight small states have in the US political system. In European states such as Poland, the inability of the left to get its act together and form an electoral alliance with moderate conservatives, liberals and neo-liberals keeps the authoritarian and nationalist populists in power, or gives them a path to power. The leaders of existing major parties are incapable of transcending their personal ambitions and ideological frameworks in the interest of prevailing over the more determined and coherent authoritarian populists.