Adnan Farzat/NurPhoto via AP
People gathered at the Place de la République to demonstrate against the French far-right National Rally party, June 10, 2024, in Paris.
As a magazine of the American left, the Prospect focuses a great deal on the policies of and forces within the Democratic Party and its progressive periphery. What we don’t do all that often is compare the Democrats to their European counterparts. But with a host of European elections now upon us, with parties of the Euroleft scrambling both to realign and redefine themselves, and with the Democrats facing off against the neofascism of Donald Trump, such comparisons seem very much in order.
This quick and fragmentary cook’s tour begins with the British Labour Party, which increasingly seems to have a left and a right but not much of a middle. The party wasn’t expecting to go to the polls quite this early, but Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to get the agony of continued Conservative rule over quickly led to a somewhat bewildering snap decision to hold the parliamentary election on July 4. Coupled with French President Emmanuel Macron’s even more surprising decision to hold his nation’s parliamentary elections during the next three weeks, one might conclude that the leaders of the European center-right have succumbed to the political equivalent of a quick death wish.
But U.K. Labour has known for some time that elections would have to be held at least by year’s end, and have been repositioning themselves accordingly. The electoral wipeout suffered by Labour when the Brits last went to the polls in 2019, soundly rejecting the radicalism of Jeremy Corbyn, clearly convinced most of the party’s officeholders and leaders that they needed to move toward the center. That’s exactly what party leader Keir Starmer has done, but to such an extent that he increasingly sounds like Labour’s last prime minister, Tony Blair.
Like his contemporaries and counterparts Bill Clinton and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder, Blair shepherded the transformation of a formerly working-class-rooted party into a neoliberal one that advocated free trade, business concentration, and financial deregulation. All three of those turn-of-the-century leaders left nations beset by rising economic inequality and financial instability in their wakes.
Unfortunately, Starmer and other Labour leaders seemed to have propelled their party from Corbyn’s radicalism and borderline antisemitism to Blair’s “Third Way” big business lovefest, with precious little effort to find a social democratic standpoint in between. Campaign rhetoric focuses more on boosting businesses than on workers’ concerns. Starmer’s shadow chancellor (his designee for the equivalent of Treasury secretary should Labour win) Rachel Reeves has repeatedly pledged not to raise corporate taxes and proclaimed Labour to be “the natural party of business.” As part of what The Economist has termed Labour’s “striking courtship of business,” Reeves and Starmer have met with the leaders of virtually all of the U.K.’s “350,” the nation’s largest publicly traded companies.
Absent a kindred outreach to economic progressives, what’s missing from Labour is the kind of alliance that Joe Biden struck with the leaders of the Democrats’ economic left—Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—as he put together his administration. That may be because the neo-New Dealism of Sanders and Warren wasn’t all that hard to reconcile with the party’s sense of its history and mission, and in a way just updated them to deal with 21st-century plutocracy. Biden had little difficulty embracing its policies, whereas many of those that Corbyn had pushed on Labour came from the more sectarian and hermetic world of the British far left. In consequence, anyone hoping to hear proposals of reforms to the U.K.’s actually existing uber-financialized capitalism from Starmer and company would be very disappointed.
The direction that the French left has taken during the tumultuous week since Macron decided to roll the nation’s dice provides a more hopeful tale. There, the four left parties—the Socialists, Communists, Greens, and La France Insoumise—have come together to agree on a platform and a common slate of candidates in a joint attempt to keep Marine Le Pen’s identitarian National Rally party from taking power, as well as to relegate Macron and his center-right party to history’s dustbin. These four parties, which more often than not ferociously opposed one another until last week, have done the hard work of forging a common platform.
What has concentrated the minds of the French left is the very real prospect of a neofascist party winning control of the parliament one month from now.
The easy parts were pledging to roll back Macron’s decree raising the nation’s retirement age, and increasing taxes on the rich, proceeds from which would partly go to hastening conversion to a greener economy. The harder part involved promises to continue arms supplies to Ukraine. The parties also pledged to back an embargo of arms supply to Israel, a cease-fire including the release of hostages, and a condemnation of Hamas as a theocratic party that had engaged in terrorist massacres—terms that some on the French far left had previously refused to employ.
What has concentrated the minds of the French left is the very real prospect of a neofascist party winning control of the parliament one month from now. No such strategic concentration is evident yet in the American left, where the even more appalling prospect of Donald Trump winning state power is still more plausible than Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s protégé, ascending to prime minister. To be sure, Biden has been an enabler of Israel’s war in Gaza, by which he’s made himself a divisive figure for U.S. progressives, in a way that no one on the French left has.
On the other hand, the four-party compact in France has omitted one key element: their choice for prime minister. A number of the parties’ leaders are fiercely opposed by other parties’ leaders, and members, too—none more so than La France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom many in the other parties (and some in his own) view as a potential French equivalent of Jeremy Corbyn. This neo–Popular Front will have to designate that PM candidate, however, between the first and second rounds of the upcoming election, where the pressure to produce an acceptable choice will smash up against the amour propre of the parties and their leaders, with an outcome that’s impossible to predict. Even so, the recognition shown by the historically fissiparous French left that the prospect of fascism compels them to come together, even if only provisionally, provides a valuable lesson to their American comrades facing a possible future of even more barbarous misrule.
With the upcoming elections in France and the U.K., it’s easy to miss the problems in what is Europe’s most dominant nation, Germany. There, the far-right AfD came in second in the recent EU parliamentary election, narrowly outpolling the Social Democrats, who are the lead party in the coalition government. The AfD’s 16 percent of the vote was alarming, notwithstanding that it reflected a decline in its support from the 22 percent that polls were showing a few months before. And the worst problems confronting the governing Social Democrats would confront any party in control of the government at a time when the nation’s chief energy source—Russian gas—had been cut off due to a war whose existence has nothing to do with German governmental policy.
That said, Germany’s Social Democrats face the challenge of being constitutionally blocked from enacting core social democratic policies. The nation’s historic anti-Keynesianism was codified in Germany’s constitution in 2016, which forbade any deficit spending that exceeded 0.35 percent of the nation’s GDP. The COVID pandemic provided a temporary off-ramp from that limit; German courts held that deficit spending to get the nation through the pandemic was legal. But the courts have refused to permit the government to exceed that limit to help Germans deal with the higher energy costs that have come with the cessation of Russian fossil fuels. Moreover, the third party in the Social Democrats’ coalition, the Free Democrats (FDP), are the kind of budget-balance zealots who plagued the Obama administration from within (see: the Simpson-Bowles Commission), but from which the Biden administration has been mercifully free. Even without the albatross of the FDP, however, which is proposing substantial cuts to the nation’s social programs, Germany’s Social Democrats are blocked from providing much of the social assistance that the nation’s working class in particular needs during an economic transformation due in part to the need to mitigate a climate catastrophe.
Of those three European lefts, only that in the U.K. is assured of winning the next election, though that’s overwhelmingly because during their 14 consecutive years in power, the Conservatives have convinced the public that they’re dangerous buffoons. The Tories’ collapse is so complete that they may now finish third, what with new polling showing them running behind Nigel Farage’s pop-up white nationalist party. Starmer has clearly concluded that the less he and his Labour comrades say between now and Election Day, the better. What’s disquieting is that when they do speak, they sound like Tony Blair, insensible to the continuing rise in British economic inequality that Blair’s policies helped foster.
The German center-left finds itself hamstrung by a debilitating fiscal orthodoxy that used to haunt Democratic ranks here, but now seldom does. As for the French, so far the left has stunningly shown itself capable of rising to the challenge of impending far-right misrule. If they can do it, one hopes, so can their American confrères.
