The decline of European socialism -- smack-dab in the middle of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism -- continues apace. On Sunday, the pre-eminent party of European socialism, the German Social Democrats (SDP), had their worst election since the end of World War II, winning a scant 23 percent of the vote, down from 34 percent the last time the Germans went to the polls.
The precipitous fall of the German left can be both under-interpreted (it wasn't as bad as it may look) and over-interpreted (it signals a profound crisis for socialism itself). In the spirit of inclusivity, I shall now do both.
IT WASN'T ALL THAT BAD: Total up the vote of Germany's three left parties -- the SPD; the Left (an amalgam of the reformed East German communists with left secessionists from the SPD, headed by onetime SPD Chair Oscar Lafontaine), which won 12 percent of the vote; and the Greens, who won 11 percent -- and you get roughly 45 percent of the total vote. That's 4 percent shy of the total amassed by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, who won 34 percent, and the free-market Free Democrats -- the only German party to support a move toward Anglo-American capitalism -- who won 15 percent.
But another way to look at the results is that they signaled a surge for the out parties -- both outside the governing coalition and outside the center of German politics -- at the expense of the ins. Germany has been governed by a Christian Democrat-Social Democrat coalition that satisfied nobody and that made it all but impossible for the SPD to run as a genuine opposition party. The SPD lost votes to the Left and the Greens, while the Christian Democrats -- who had their lowest vote percentage since 1949 -- lost votes to the Free Democrats. But add the Free Democrats' total to the Christian Democrats', and the center-right has a majority in the new Bundestag.
By German standards, turnout was low -- just over 70 percent -- and polling showed that nonvoters were more inclined to the left than to the right. But for whatever reasons -- the cohabitation of the SPD with the Christian Democrats in the outgoing government is a plausible suspect, as is the SPD's difficulty in formulating a distinct, plausible economic vision -- millions of potential left voters stayed away from the polls. In the 1970s, American political scientist Walter Dean Burnham argued that the United States suffered from "a hole in the electorate" -- the electoral nonparticipation of voters whose profile matched those voters in Europe who voted for parties of the left. Could it be that that hole has now popped up in Europe as well?
If it has, part of the reason is surely that the leaders of the European center-right, Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in particular, have embraced much of the left's critique of laissez-faire capitalism and have sought to rein it in. On issues of global financial regulation, Merkel and Sarkozy have often stood a bit to the left, inclined to somewhat more regulation, than the left-of-center heads of government in the U.S. and U.K., Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. This may reflect an accident of political geography -- the continent has always been more statist and less free-market than the Anglo-American nations -- but that's partly because socialist parties have been stronger on the continent than they have in Anglo-American climes. In this perspective, Europe is moving, if not quite to socialism without socialists, at least to regulated capitalism without its most ardent regulators.
IT REALLY WAS THAT BAD, AND THEN SOME: The decline of Europe's socialist parties, though, can't largely be blamed on the adeptness of leaders like Sarkozy and Merkel. Italy's center-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a bad joke, yet the Italian left continues to flounder. Britain's governing Labor Party and Spain's governing Socialists are both in trouble, in part because the destructiveness of free-market economics devastated their economies. The socialist bloc in the European Parliament fared poorly in the most recent elections to that body, too.
Europe's socialists suffer from three major maladies. First, each of their parties has been the champion of the welfare state in their respective nations, but the political support for universal welfare states has weakened as immigrants have transformed the populations of the hitherto homogenous European states. Second, the relative numerical decline of the blue-collar working class across Western Europe has compelled the parties of the left to embrace new constituencies and new agendas, some of which conflict with their old constituencies and agendas. And third, though globalization has not had the catastrophic effect on European workers that it has had on their American counterparts, it has weakened the nation state's ability to manage its own economy and secure it from harm, undermining the arena where socialists won their greatest victories.
Each of these problems causes rifts within the Euro left. In Germany, those rifts were painfully evident in Sunday's election, as the SPD lost the votes of onetime constituents who believed the Left Party offered a more robust defense of the nation's welfare state. Until now, the SPD has stoutly refused at the national level to proclaim a willingness to join with the Left in a coalition government -- reflecting in part its opposition to the old East German communists (though apologists for East German Stalinism, or even Ulbrichtism, within the Left are hard to find) and in part its rage at the betrayal of Lafontaine. But some state and local leaders of the SPD have created SPD-Left coalitions of their own, most notably Berlin's SPD Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who will now battle the party's old bulls on this and other questions.
The other leading socialist parties have their own local variants of this battle, though they often come mixed in with bewildering and maddening personal rivalries, such as those now infesting the French socialists.
The irony in all this is that Europe's socialists have never done well during crises of capitalism. The Labor Party government of Ramsey MacDonald was clueless when the Great Depression of the 1930s descended upon it; of all the socialist parties, only the Swedes, who proved to be instinctive Keynesians, knew how to navigate their way to recovery. It was during the great prosperity -- the decades that followed World War II -- that Europe's socialists thrived, creating the welfare states that provided both security and prosperity on a mass basis.
Maybe capitalism and socialism thrive together, and suffer crises together. Not a theory; just a thought.
