Why Barack Obama may be lonely in 2009
What Europe wants now: right-wing leaders with left-wing ideas
DOUG SAUNDERS, Saturday's Globe and Mail
Doug Saunders | July 5, 2008
LONDON — When Barack Obama lands in Europe for his first big international tour this month, the Democratic presidential candidate may be shocked to find himself standing in the middle of a vast, blood-soaked plain littered with the bodies of his political allies.
He will see left-wing parties that have reached their lowest popularity levels in a generation and in most cases have all but slid into non-existence. And it's getting worse. If he becomes president, by the end of 2009 Mr. Obama almost certainly will be the only left-wing leader remaining among the Group of Eight nations and one of only two or three left-leaning heads of state in the Western world. Once again, America will be going it alone.
It is a darkly ironic reversal of fortunes: At the start of the decade, a conservative such as George W. Bush was almost alone in the world; today, the world is being overtaken by conservative leaders — though not necessarily, as we shall see, by their ideas. Ten years ago, Newsweek magazine proclaimed that, "with the exception of Spain, every major country in Western Europe is now run by a left-of-centre party," adding tellingly that "conservative political parties keep winning policy debates and then losing elections." Today, almost the opposite is true. Across Europe, the left is collapsing.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's left-right coalition government has recently seen its left-wing partner, the Social Democratic Party, fall to its lowest popularity level in 40 years and enter an interminable leadership crisis, allowing Ms. Merkel to govern virtually as a lone conservative. In France, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has overseen the unravelling of the Socialist Party, which has lost most of its electable leaders and failed to find any inspiring ideas. In Italy, Romano Prodi's smart but awkward left-wing coalition was bulldozed away in April by Silvio Berlusconi's angry far-right group.
Doug Saunders is the chief of the Globe and Mail's London-based European Bureau, (Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail)
In Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, social democrats have been swept out of office by conservatives, and even the traditionally left-wing cities of London and Rome have elected right-wing mayors this year. In Norway and Britain, long-standing left-wing parties are plummeting toward defeat.
Among the 27 countries of the European Union, Mr. Obama's friends are secure only in Spain, Portugal and Austria, where they can wield little wider influence.
"The democratic left in Europe is facing its gravest crisis in more than half a century," says British Labour Party MP Denis MacShane, as his Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, fails to raise his formerly world-dominating New Labour movement above the party's lowest polling results since the early 1960s.
Mr. MacShane recently wrote a blistering analysis of the left's demise, going back even further to find a precedent: "Not since the 19th-century concert of nations, when reactionary conservatives like Metternich, Talleyrand and Wellington stamped hard on liberal and proto-labour politics that challenged kings and emperors, has Europe seen so many right-wing politicians ruling the roost."
It is an extraordinary fall for the social-democratic left, which dominated the politics of the 1990s and the early 21st century and managed to redefine the world's centre of political gravity in the post-Cold War years with a new mixture of progressive social policy and economic growth.
Yet the left's collapse cannot be called a victory for right-wing thinking. Quite the contrary.
When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made his own tour of Europe in May, he met a lot of fellow conservatives and made some diplomatic inroads with them. He also encountered more left-wing policies than Europe has introduced in years — and most of them are being delivered by those conservative leaders.
Britain's social-democratic New Statesman magazine this week ran a column, meant to reassure Labour's more left-leaning supporters, headlined, "Leaders offering old-fashioned state welfare are getting elected everywhere." The European leaders it mentioned were Ms. Merkel, Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Berlusconi.
As the world's economy slows, millions of workers find themselves in precarious positions, debt crises erupt and food and fuel prices batter voters, it is the parties of the right that are very often bringing back government regulation of markets, welfare-state protections and more generous social policies.
In Germany, Ms. Merkel has surprised everyone by reversing many of the sharp welfare and social-spending cuts and reforms launched five years ago by Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. She has increased housing allowances, welfare payments and pensions.
And what has happened? Unemployment has fallen almost in half, and Germany has surpassed the U.S. and China as the world's leading exporter.
In France, Mr. Sarkozy has led the efforts to bring more government regulation to financial markets. He has championed economic nationalism and protection of key corporations from foreign takeovers and has been a leading figure in calls for carbon-emission caps across Europe.
This week, he took over the rotating presidency of the EU and immediately launched a "renewed social agenda" of continent-wide welfare and health-care programs, including a universal right for European citizens to take advantage of public-health services in one another's countries — all of it inaugurated with a speech calling for increased state protection of the poor and vulnerable.
Even Mr. Berlusconi has proposed increases in corporate taxation and has introduced new welfare programs to subsidize food and fuel purchases.
In Britain, Tory Leader David Cameron has spent the past year running to the left of Mr. Brown on social policies, calling for more generous public services and a government aimed at helping the poor rather than maximizing profit.
There's a price for such policies: True-blue Tories have likened Mr. Cameron to Pol Pot, just as more conservative members of Ms. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union complain that she has gone soft. But these are shrewd politicians who know what their voters want — and it isn't conservative austerity and spending cuts.
Fear factor
Indeed, even as it welcomes its new blue-tinted family of leaders, Europe seems to be seeing a great leftward tilt of the electorate.
"Across the Western world, the political middle is shifting back toward the left," German author Gabor Steingart wrote in Der Spiegel magazine. "Surprisingly, it may be the conservatives who are best equipped to capitalize on the shift. ¡K It comes as no surprise that voters now favour the type of politician who knows how to combine the market's invisible hand with the iron fist of the state. ...
"[Voters] have worried their way into the leftist camp. They fear competition that overburdens them. They fear a war that they cannot win. And they fear a damaged environment that could come back to haunt them."
There, in the deep-seated fear that now grips voters across the Western world, lies the source of the left's collapse — and the reason why many people are now electing right-wing parties to deliver left-wing policies.
The great accomplishment of the 1990s, when the Cold War conservatives were driven out of office by a new type of left-wing politician in the U.S., Western Europe and (to a lesser extent) Canada, was the left's re-conquest of optimism and confidence.
After the 1970s, the word "progressive" had ceased to have much meaning for left-wing parties: Their main agenda and overarching concern for 30 years was opposition to the policies of conservatives. By default, left-wing parties had become reactionary, offering little more than a turning back of the clock on the right's version of progress. The postwar left had a solid set of social programs, but it had abandoned the economy to the right.
Then, in a dramatic reshaping of the social-democratic parties of Europe and the Democratic Party in the U.S., the left reclaimed ownership of its greatest invention: the liberal market economy. The boom years of the 1990s were largely the product of left-of-centre parties allowing the economy to run freely and using some of that wealth to rebuild the state institutions that had been devastated in the years of conservative austerity.
However, by reclaiming the economic mantle, the new leftists struck a Faustian bargain: No longer could they boast about the welfare state or social security, lest they arouse suspicions.
In Britain, New Labour advisers called this "stealth redistribution" — improve life for the poor, but don't tell anyone about it. In Washington, Bill Clinton loudly carried out his promise to "end welfare as we know it," while quietly increasing social spending in key areas. The bywords were "aspiration," "consumer choice," "empowerment." The poor actually did improve their lot, but the middle class didn't know it, and the left became trusted money managers.
But fear didn't fit into the equation. The current global financial shock and pending recession, combined with the disappearance of the old secure-job industrial economy, has sent voters searching for security, not for the exhilaration of choice. Now that the liberal, global market is hurting voters rather than enriching them, there is an appetite for something else. The left had shown that it could be confident, tough, hawkish, bankable and even exciting, but the field of comfort and confidence had been abandoned. The new right has stepped into that field.
Sometimes, conservatives satisfy this need in conventionally right-wing ways — especially on crime and immigration, where the new conservatives have ranged from tough (in France, where mass deportations are taking place) to outright hateful (in Italy, where some ethnic groups are now being fingerprinted). But conservatives have also managed to buy up the left's former monopoly on social security, both in rhetoric and often in policies, and do good electoral business there.
Neal Lawson, a former adviser and speechwriter to Gordon Brown, recently blasted his party for losing this key piece of terrain, for leaving a large open space that has been filled by parties of the right across Europe.
"Labour's neo-liberals have emerged out of the decade-long process of triangulation," he said, "so ideological and electoral strategy come together: The Tories [were] defeated by taking their terrain before they have a chance to get there." But now, he added, Mr. Brown "has left so much space to the left that David Cameron has found it impossible not to leapfrog into it."
Behind these acrobatics you'll find the truly great comic paradox of our age: The left is struggling to find ways to seize the social safety net away from its current champions on the right, while conservatives are hoping they might win the free-market economy back from its owners on the left. A decade ago, it would have been impossible to imagine.
And as the bloodied left-wing parties struggle to find their way to some future victory, while conservatives search for messages that haven't been borrowed from the other side, it's increasingly clear that absolutely nobody has any idea what will happen next.
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