How the European right wing have become unlikely innovators in the worldwide financial crisis
The economic crisis the world is currently experiencing has been the worst since the Great Depression. In such a period, nothing could be easier than pointing out market failures and the inefficiencies of deregulated capitalism. Indeed, it should be the perfect setting for an increase in state control, welfare, and redistributionist policies. In the United States, this took the form of the election of a liberal president. But in Europe, the equivalents of American liberals-that is, Socialists and Social Democrats-are losing ground everywhere.
Why is this happening? While the right is trying to find new strategies and new ideas to tackle the new problems presented by the crisis, socialist and social democratic parties grow more and more attached to their traditional core values. Not only has this kind of left-wing conservatism accounted for the decline of socialist parties in Europe to date, it is likely to cause them to lose even more ground in the future. Indeed, given their philosophical foundation in the vein of Hegel and by Marx, perhaps the socialist parties of today are simply no longer fulfilling the role for which they were born.
A quick look at all major left parties in the most influential countries of the European Union proves the strength of this trend. In France, the country with the strongest tradition of state influence in public life, the Socialist Party is at its historical ebb. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party experienced more than a ten percent reduction in vote share in the last election, while all other parties gained ground at its expense. The UK’s relatively benign Labour Party was surpassed for the first time in history by the Liberal Democrats in the 2008 local elections, compounding the broad defeat it suffered against Tories in the London mayoral election. And notwithstanding the scandals of its leader, Italian right-wing party The People of Freedom has won a parliamentary majority whose size is unusual in Italian republican history, while the left-wing Democratic Party endured a change in leadership after several regional defeats.
To understand why this decline occurred, we must consider the case of left parties that do not identify as socialist as well as that of right-wing parties. In both cases, promotion of change and of new ideas unchained to old ideological diktats lead to a positive response in their elections, whereas the traditionalism of socialist parties proved itself to be a detriment. In contrast to the socialist parties, which in the last elections of the European Parliament lost nine percentage points in share of the vote, ranking last in performance, the Greens had the best performance with over 25% gain in seats. Green parties are relatively new compared to socialist parties-and their support of environmentalism, nonviolence, grass-root democracy, and social responsibility reflect ideas that started only in the ’80s as a response to the problems that the increasing industrialization and globalization of the present world.
As for right-wing parties, what unites all cases at a national level is the quite surprising shift they have made towards advocating very different from what was previously considered “conservative.” Recently, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France even claimed, “Laissez-faire capitalism is finished”-a line one might expect from a socialist leader during a time where the deregulated market economy is showing its weaknesses, but Sarkozy heads one of the biggest right-wing parties in Europe. In Italy, new economic policies are more in line with Sarkozy’s philosophy than the ruling party’s official conservative credo. The government’s new self-proclaimed mission is to help those citizens worst affected by the financial crisis-and thus, as Minister of the Economy Giulio Tremonti put it, it is willing to be called left-winged “if being left-winged means being next to the poor people who suffer the crisis.”
Why is the ideological answer of the left-which was, after all, “right all along”-insufficient? As Michele Salvati, the ideological co-founder of the Italian Democratic Party, argues, “The left has adapted to the economic system created by the right and by capitalism and lost its old specificity of being against this whole system.” Thus, it is intrinsically difficult-though not impossible-for left parties to present a sufficiently strong ideological alternative to right wing parties on economical issues. Since “the left has been ‘capitalized’, homogenizing to the market system in force,” And when a crisis like the current one comes along, such adaptation that previously permitted left-wing parties to survive now restricts them to a turf on which they are at inherent disadvantage. The only way to survive as viable political players, then, is to continue to innovate upon capitalism and present alternatives to the failing status quo-which, this time around, the Socialist left has not done.
Given this passive adaptation of the left to the economic model shaped by free-market capitalism, it becomes clear that both the rise of the Greens at an European level and the successes of the right at a national level are due to the fact that they presented a new approach to the problems brought up by the crisis, promoting a change in their parties that led to a positive response in the electorate. In fact, Salvati admits that “the right has now the same credibility going against laissez-faire capitalism than the left has,” so when Socialist and Social-Democratic parties tried to face this period of instability sticking even more to their traditional core values, ideas and policies, the outcome couldn’t be but negative. Because their rhetoric remained focused upon the past and on the implications of the failure of capitalism rather than proactive prescriptions to fix it, the Socialists thus sabotaged their chance at political advantage.
And in a deeper sense, socialist parties that lost their progressive, innovative edge were also deprived of their original revolutionary mantle, so critical to their utility since their birth. The term “left” was coined during the French revolution to describe those who sat in the left part of the Parliament, who advocated a republic instead of monarchy, secularization in the Enlightenment’s philosophical tradition, and a general resettling of class benefits and of wealth distribution. That single word, Left, represented the advocates of change against the status-quo: the aristocracy and the high hierarchies of the church. Within that tradition, socialism was deeply influenced by G.W. Hegel and Karl Marx, who saw history progressing through conflicts between Thesis-a status quo-and its Antithesis-or opposition. Through revolution, progress; from its very birth, Socialism very birth has been inseparably connected to the fact that the ideology of the Left should be an agent of change, of challenge and of new ideas against previous ones.
Given the role of socialist ideology in the past, it is particularly tragic that the Socialist parties of today have lost this role and acquired one which is its direct opposite: defending their past vision of the world without changing it through new ideas. As it is, right-wing parties are instead acting as the real promoters of change towards a new together with the new forces rising in the left. Unless Socialist parties strive to create a new a competing brand of ideas and reassert their true revolutionary, they will remain stuck on the wrong side of history-that of a narrow and conservative vision of politics.