Europe's left: the time for tactics is over

Europe's left: the time for tactics is over

The latest election results show that if the left wants to grow again, it must rethink its program – and take care of the democracy that has gone off course.
By Georg Diez

[This article posted on 7/18/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/2429/europas-linke/die-zeit-der-taktik-ist-vorbei/!WYSVPKCK05NM.]

Alternatives to the system of ritualized elections are needed. Polling station in Lyon on July 7. Photo: Caroline Minjolle

The situation is somewhat unclear, but the desire is there: Was what was shown in the elections of the past few weeks a sign that it is possible to counter the power-hunger of authoritarian-nationalist or neo-fascist parties? Are there any signs here, in terms of personnel and program, of what a new left-wing politics could be? Can conclusions be drawn from the elections in France, the UK and the European Parliament that point the way forward politically? Are the successes more than tactical territorial gains?

A few examples: in Sweden, the Left Party Vänsterpartiet increased its share of the vote by 4.4 percentage points in the European elections, the Greens by 2.4 and the Social Democrats by 1.2 percentage points – the governing Christian Democrats lost 3 percentage points, the coalition partner Centerpartiet lost 3.5 percentage points and the far-right Sweden Democrats lost 2.2 percentage points. The turnout in Sweden was 53 percent, which was as low as in the rest of Europe – almost half of all voters do not even believe that it makes sense to participate in this important election and to clearly express support for a different policy.

The result in Sweden is the same as in Finland, where the turnout was a depressing forty percent and the Left Party was the clear winner with a ten percent increase in votes: across Europe, we are experiencing a crisis of democracy; a systemic crisis that cannot be solved with the old structures and offers, in terms of personnel and programmatic. This is an opportunity for the left to put forward candidates like Li Andersson in Finland or Nooshi Dadgostar in Sweden: both are under forty and formulate a clear new policy that prioritizes social justice and combines it with climate justice. But is that enough?
In the ruins of our time

Across Europe, support for democracy as a system that many people believe can solve the problems of the future is low. Dangerously low, because apathy and disengagement form the basis for anti-democratic parties and show a real imbalance in the system. For too long, the parties of the center-left and, above all, social democrats have been content to settle for the programmatic ruins of our time. It seems clear that the programmatic premises that have shaped politics since the 1990s – low taxes, a small, frugal state, redistribution from the bottom up, tough austerity policies – have come to an end. And without a fundamental renewal of content, trust in the system will not return.

This is also suggested by some of the contributions to the debate that could be read in France before and after the early parliamentary elections. The left-wing alliance of the New Popular Front (NFP) emerged as the surprise winner of the elections – a tactical masterstroke that united the left-wing party La France insoumise, the socialists, or rather social democrats, the Greens and the communists. However, it is completely unclear how they intend to govern, and shortly after the election they fell out over the question of who should become prime minister – the only thing they were united on was opposing the far-right Rassemblement National (RN).
In terms of programmatic policy, the economist Thomas Piketty, for example, spoke out in favor of a clear new beginning in Le Monde: the left must finally describe and build "the alternative economic system" that can replace neoliberalism. He was supported in this demand by the economist Gabriel Zucman, who had already made a new attempt at a worldwide tax on the super-rich before the elections.

Distorted relationships

This is where the real fault line of our time is revealed, and it offers the left an opportunity. The neoliberal era, which began in the 1980s, gained considerable momentum in the 1990s under Bill Clinton in the USA, Tony Blair in the UK and Gerhard Schröder in Germany. It led to growing economic and social inequality, gave up the state's means of control, namely taxes, and increasingly delegitimized the state through austerity measures and a fundamental mistrust in its ability to function. This era, as the historian Gary Gerstle describes it in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order", has come to an end.

It remains the task of the left to find substantive answers to this end, to respond to a vacuum that is also a vacuum of ideas, of stories, of images and self-images: What should the state of tomorrow look like, which is at the same time stronger in the sense of a caring and provident state that invests in infrastructure and the future, anticipates demographic and climate change and finds sustainable concepts? And at the same time, it should be more flexible, not in the neoliberal sense, but moving away from the concept of a strong state, as it still hovers in the minds of some social democrats as a memory from the seventies: more open to risk and uncertainty, more permeable to people and ideas?

All this has a lot to do with fundamental considerations about the nature of the system we call democracy. But how exactly should it, can it, function under different technological conditions? How can democracy become more permeable? For example, through digital citizens' councils? How can communication between citizens and politicians be made faster, more on an equal footing? How can there be alternatives to the system of elections every four years? For example, new round tables, as they were so successfully used in the final days of the socialist states in 1989/90? How can we close a fundamental representation gap and ensure that the right to vote is no longer tied to citizenship (in Switzerland, a quarter of citizens are excluded from democratic participation)? In other words, how can all the people living in a country decide together how that country should be governed?

All of this is important to see, especially after the apparent left-wing success in the last elections. Because beyond the programmatic questions, a closer look at the actual election results shows how skewed the current system is in terms of power relations: the RN increased its share of the vote from 29 to 31 percent from the first to the second round of voting, putting it ahead of the NFP with 25.7 percent – but the number of seats is considerably smaller, 125 for the RN and 178 for the NFP. And Emmanuel Macron's party Ensemble – with 23 percent far behind the RN – has 150 seats in parliament, more than the election winners from the far right.

These are distortions in the system that will not last much longer. This has been equally clear in the UK. There, Labour has won by far the most seats, after fourteen years of truly disastrous Tory policies. This result also massively distorts the proportions of the electorate's will, because Labour, with 34 percent of the vote, has more than three times as many MPs as the conservative Tory party with 23 percent; on the other hand, the Labour victory is not a victory, but a Tory defeat. Due to the very low turnout of less than sixty percent – the lowest since the introduction of universal suffrage – the new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer enjoys less support in pure votes than, for example, the unelected Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and Tony Blair in 1997.

Too quiet, too defensive
This in turn means that many voters who feel ignored by the system either leave the democratic process altogether or turn to the far-right alternatives, which at least promise to have answers to the crisis. The left has increasingly given up on formulating these answers in the wake of the neoliberal turn of the 1990s – and Keir Starmer, in turn, is an old-fashioned and right-wing social democrat, hard on law and order as well as on his restrictive spending policy, far from presenting constructive and systemic solutions.

But that is precisely what we need to do now: to shape the 21st century without fear and with our own left-wing ideas. Research shows that there is no shift to the right in the sense that social democratic parties are losing voters to right-wing parties, which they are pursuing programmatically, for example, with anti-immigration rhetoric and policies; the parties in the center-left are losing support because they are not formulating their own positions that address issues of social and economic inequality as well as crumbling schools, tax injustice and climate change that is spiraling out of control.

This is where left-wing politics must begin: with the realization that we are at the beginning of a new era. Donald Trump, for example, has answers; he knows how he wants to shape the future after neoliberalism. The left must clearly oppose this, with its own ideas and answers, and no longer with the same old things. The time for tactics is over. What is needed is a real change in strategy and political program. It also requires an understanding that cultural affiliation plays an important role when it comes to identifying with a political direction. Trump's MAGA stormers have understood this; the left is too quiet, too defensive and not brave enough here either.

All of this will take a while. It is a left-wing generational project because the pendulum of history is currently swinging in the opposite direction.

Georg Diez (55) was a columnist at Der Spiegel and is now a fellow of the Max Planck Society and a senior advisor at Project Together, where he works on issues of democratic innovation.