Social Democ THE AGONY
Why did social democracy collapse? Can Joe Biden point the way to a resurgent trans-Atlantic democratic left?
IN THE UNITED STATES, we have a national
administration whose program, though far from socialist, is more progressive than any since Franklin Roosevelt’s. But in Europe, where citizens have had substantial experience with constructive social democracy, the democratic left is all but dead. Somehow, the U.S. and Europe have reversed roles. What happened? As recently as a generation ago, European social democracy seemed well entrenched. In the late 1990s, 13 of the 15 member governments of the European Union were leftof-center coalitions led by social democrats. Today, with the EU having grown to 27 member states, just six European counties have center-left prime ministers, and the social democratic vote in most of continental Europe has dwindled to 20 percent or less. The French Socialist Party, which held the presidency as recently as 2017, is near collapse. The German SPD got just 20.5 percent of the vote in the most recent federal election, also in 2017, its lowest share since before World War I, and is now polling around 15 percent, well below the Greens. The British Labour Party is languishing in the polls, far behind the comic-opera Tory prime minister, Boris Johnson. Even the exceptions are shaky. Sweden, long the epitome of European social democracy, has had a weak, minority two-party coalition with the Greens led by a Social
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Democratic prime minister, Stefan Löfven, supported in parliament by two center-right parties and the Left Party. The government recently collapsed over rent control. Löfven lost a vote of confidence in June after the Left Party withdrew its support, and barely won a vote to proceed with a newly configured coalition for the final year of his term. In the 2018 election, the Social Democrats got their lowest share of the national vote in a century. In Denmark, the social democratic prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, leads a four-party coalition, also reliant on the votes of non-socialists. In the last election, her party got 25.9 percent of the vote. In Spain, a talented social democrat, Pedro Sánchez, leads a minority government in fragile coalition with the further left Podemos and a Catalan party. In the two 2019 elections, his party got about 28 and 29 percent of the vote. Only in small Portugal is there a durable, popular, and effective all-left coalition government, led by the socialists, who received over 36 percent of the vote. Elsewhere in the EU’s 27 member states, the right governs. In the spirit of Tolstoy, one can report that each European nation’s social democratic party is unhappy in its own way. But it’s evident that some common system-wide blight felled Europe’s entire social democratic movement. The particulars are
PAUL CHIASSON / AP PHOTO
By Robert Kuttner
