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The UK prime minister Rishi Sunak with his ‘new best friend” Giorgia Meloni at a
political festival organised by her Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) party
in December 2023. Photograph: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
The UK prime minister Rishi Sunak with his ‘new best friend” Giorgia Meloni at a
political festival organised by her Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) party
in December 2023. Photograph: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
The ObserverPolitics



EUROPE IS MARCHING TO THE RIGHT. CAN KEIR STARMER CARRY THE CENTRE-LEFT TORCH?

Tim Bale



If he wins the election, the Labour leader will find himself a beacon of hope
for progressives

Sun 14 Jan 2024 02.30 ESTLast modified on Sun 14 Jan 2024 08.53 EST
 * 
 * 
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536
536

If Keir Starmer’s Labour party wins power this year, it will be bucking a trend.
In many European countries, it’s not the centre left but the right – and all too
often the far right – that seems to be on a roll.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is leading in the polls. In
the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ equally extreme Freedom party (PVV) scooped
nearly a quarter of the vote at last November’s general election and has
increased its support as coalition negotiations drag on.



In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the supposedly “post-fascist” Fratelli
d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), is already running the country. And, although
Rishi Sunak’s new best friend is playing nice with foreign leaders, at home
she’s attempting to make yet another change to the country’s electoral system.
If she gets her way, not only will Italy get a directly elected prime minister
but whichever party emerges as the largest at the next election (as Fratelli did
in 2022 with just 26%) will win a majority of parliamentary seats irrespective
of its vote share.

The situation in Germany is not much rosier. In 2021, the Social Democrats
(SPD), led by the defiantly uncharismatic centrist, Olaf Scholz, won a narrow
victory, enabling them to form a “traffic light” coalition with the Free
Democrats and the Greens.

Sadly, things have gone downhill ever since. With the country mired in a
so-called winter of discontent, the SPD is now polling at just 15%, down 10
points on its 2021 showing, putting it in third place behind not only the
Christian Democratic CDU/CSU (on 32%) but also the worryingly extreme
Alternative for Germany (AfD), which now has the support of over one in five
Germans.

> There’s an extent to which centre-left parties only have themselves to blame

A “black-blue” (CDU/CSU and AfD) coalition after 2025’s general election remains
unlikely but it can’t be ruled out. Indeed, talking up the possibility may
actually be the SPD’s only hope of a last-gasp recovery.

After all, framing last year’s election in Spain as “a showdown between the
forces of progress and the forces of reactionary conservatism” represented by a
putative government of the centre-right Partido Popular and the far-right Vox
saw the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, of the Spanish Socialist
Workers’ party (PSOE), snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Whether his
subsequent decision to cling on to office via a controversial deal with Catalan
separatists is such a wise move, however, remains to be seen.



Sánchez’s dramatic escape and Vox’s disappointing performance serve as a useful
caveat to anyone overly inclined to see the far right triumphing and the centre
left losing everywhere they look. So, too, at least for the moment, do Denmark
and Norway. That said, it is impossible to deny that the 21st century has seen
the far right thrive and the centre left descend into long-term decline
throughout western Europe.

The reasons are myriad and complex, and they vary between countries. We do need,
though, to avoid falling into the trap of assuming that, simply because populist
radical right parties have increased their support at the same time as social
democratic parties have lost theirs, the change is due to working-class voters
moving en masse from one to the other.

Indeed, the latest research suggests that this is far from the case, with most
of those flocking to the far right coming either from more mainstream rightwing
parties or from the ranks of the serially disillusioned. Meanwhile, many of
those fleeing the centre left are going either to the Greens and the radical
left or (and this should never be underestimated) switching to the centre right
rather than the far right.

> The centre left has sacrificed its ability to offer voters the safety net
> against insecurity that many still crave

In fact, the loss of traditional working-class voters experienced by Europe’s
centre left is mainly due to the disappearance of many of the industrial, often
heavily unionised, jobs that they used to do, and the concomitant rise in more
diverse, fragmented and, frankly, more middle-class, service-sector employment.

Yet there’s an extent to which centre-left parties only have themselves to
blame. And that includes Labour, even if, so far, it has got off relatively
lightly compared with its continental counterparts – thanks mainly to
first-past-the-post discouraging Britain’s progressive voters from supposedly
“wasting” their vote on more radical alternatives.

By insisting for years that we should all embrace (or at least learn to live
with) a more marketised, less welfarist economy, the centre left has sacrificed
its ability to offer voters the safety net against insecurity that many, not
unreasonably, still crave.

At the same time, with politics becoming an overwhelmingly graduate profession,
centre-left politicians look and sound less and less like the people they claim
to represent.

All this has played (and continues to play) into the hands of charismatic
political entrepreneurs on the populist radical right who draw a rhetorically
powerful distinction between an apparently out-of-touch establishment elite and
“the people” they’ve arguably let down and ignored.

It’s a distinction that populist politicians have found particularly easy to
dramatise, too, as their more mainstream counterparts, in their desperation to
prove they are “listening to voters”, have consistently overpromised and
underdelivered – most obviously on controlling immigration.

Those same mainstream politicians – on the centre left as well as the centre
right – have also done the far right a favour by adopting many of its populist
tropes and hardline policies. Rather than stealing their thunder, that strategy
has served only to make them look to more and more voters like an increasingly
viable and legitimate option.

Starmer, then, may be bucking the trend if he makes it into No 10. But, once he
gets there, he also needs be careful. By overdoing the fiscal orthodoxy and the
tough talk on migration, he could easily end up reinforcing Europe’s big shift
to the right instead of becoming a beacon of hope for the continent’s battered
progressives. Sometimes it’s good to be the odd one out.

Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and
co-editor with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser of Riding the Populist Wave

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