'Lessons From Abroad: How Can Labour Win?' - Lucia Henwood

'Lessons From Abroad: How Can Labour Win?' - Lucia Henwood

The path to victory for the left often seems like a narrow one. It is not only in the UK that rightwing or centre-right parties are seen as the natural parties of government. In Germany, the Chancellor has been a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for over fifty of the last seventy-two years. In France, the President has been from the left in under twenty of the last sixty years. In the US, the electoral system which provides equal representation in the Senate to each state, regardless of population, offers an in-built advantage to Republicans in the legislative branch. In Japan, the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party has been the largest party in every parliamentary election bar two since 1958. Across much of the world, it seems to be an uphill battle for the left to win.

However, in recent elections, across Europe and elsewhere, centre-left parties have seen a resurgence, seemingly reversing the rightward drift observed over the past few years. A few years ago, the rise of the extreme right and the decline, or even extinction, of the traditional left featured heavily in political coverage; now there is talk of a social democratic moment in global politics. This, combined with polling in the UK showing a consistent Labour lead for much of 2022, has led to optimism about the chances of victory for Labour (or a leftwing coalition) at the next general election.

In Germany, the results of the 2021 federal election showed that reports of the death of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been greatly exaggerated. In 2017, when the SPD won just over 20% of the vote, lagging 12% behind the largest party, the CDU/CSU, before falling further in the polls in the years that followed, it seemed destined to share the fate of the French Parti Socialiste (PS). Historically the main party of the left, the PS went from holding the French presidency in 2017 to fading into irrelevance, eventually coming tenth with only 1.75% of the vote in the first round of the 2022 presidential election.

Instead, the SPD in Germany was the largest party in 2021, leading the traffic light coalition (with the centrist FDP and the Greens) which took power after months of negotiations in November. Their victory was partly down to the quiet popularity of their candidate for Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose personal approval ratings were consistently higher than his party’s. His experience as Vice Chancellor and moderate style made him appear the natural heir to Angela Merkel. The CDU/CSU meanwhile never managed to fill the void left by Merkel’s departure with her successor, Armin Laschet, unpopular even within his own party. He also made a series of high-profile blunders, dismissing calls for a stronger response to the climate emergency, after flooding in his own district killed over a hundred people in the summer of 2021, by saying ‘you don’t change policies because of one day like this.’ At an event a few days later, he was pictured laughing while the president gave a speech in response to the floods. In the end, Laschet claimed personal responsibility when the election that September ended sixteen years of CDU-led government.

For much of this year, analysts predicted Republican gains in the 2022 midterm elections in the US, possibly leading Democrats to lose both houses of Congress which they currently hold by narrow margins. Biden’s record-breaking unpopularity, a polarised and highly partisan political climate, and the beginnings of an economic crisis, combined with the tendency of the electorate to punish the president’s party in the midterms led to predictions of dire results for the Democratic Party. Now, however, enthusiasm is growing among the left about the Party’s prospects in November. FiveThirtyEight, the news site and polling aggregator, recently gave the Democrats a 30% chance of holding the House compared to 13% in June; it also puts the Democrats as favourites to have a Senate majority. Matthew Yglesias, an American political commentator, attributes the Democrats’ changing fortunes to the growing radicalism of the Republican Party. In the past, midterm losses for the president’s party have been driven by ‘a sense of backlash to policy overreach’, yet at the moment, conservatives, by questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election and overturning Roe vs Wade, are seen as departing more radically from political convention and consensus. Success in the midterms may depend more on the Democrats seeming the more reasonable of two alternatives than on any positive actions of their own.

Not only are there examples of traditional parties of the centre-left seeing a resurgence but in some countries new parties have emerged. In Slovenia, parliamentary elections in April 2022 were won by a party, the Freedom Movement, which had not existed at the last election. Led by a political outsider, Robert Golob, who campaigned on his environmental record in business, it proved successful at mobilising voters especially among the young, increasing turnout by 18% compared to the previous election. While its ambitious environmentalist platform played a role, Golob also described the election as a ‘referendum on democracy’, tapping into protests against the government of Janez Jansa, a populist ally of Donald Trump’s. Voters rejected the government’s corruption and attempts to interfere with the judiciary and public media as much as they embraced the liberalism of the Freedom Movement.

The very different paths to victory of left-wing politicians across the world shows that no single politicians across the world shows that no single blueprint for electoral success can be drawn from past experiences. A lot of the gains made by the left in other countries are due to contingent circumstances and Labour cannot build an electoral strategy around the right picking unpopular battles, as in the US, or uncharismatic leaders, as in Germany (although both look promising in the UK at the moment!) Especially as a party in opposition, Labour cannot control much of what will determine the result of the next general election: the personal popularity of Liz Truss and her cabinet, the success of government policy in tackling inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, the global economic situation over the next few years.

However, this does not mean that the successes of other left-wing parties offer no lessons for the Labour Party. Both the unpopularity of right-wing opponents like Donald Trump, Armin Laschet and Janez Jansa and the popularity of left-wing candidates were necessary for recent left-wing successes. Candidates like Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden won in part because they were seen as moderate, trustworthy, and experienced. This made them effective alternatives to opponents who seemed incompetent, corrupt or extreme; voters disillusioned with the right had somewhere to turn.

Another lesson from recent political events is to have a programme worth winning for. Not only can an ambitious platform be the key to a winning political campaign, even for untested candidates, as events in Slovenia showed, but political winds can change quickly. In Sweden, the Social Democrats conceded power on September 14th, yet the Party’s legacy will survive its time in office, as architects of Sweden’s robust welfare state and as instigators of a number of progressive initiatives, including generous paid parental leave and support for female participation in the public sector workforce. Similarly, in the US, regardless of what happens in November, the Democratic Party can claim a number of achievements from its time in control of Congress, from student debt relief to driving bipartisan gun control reform to the package of environmental policies included in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Labour leadership can learn from this too. It needs to prepare a programme for government, not because electoral success is certain, but because it is often fleeting.

When it comes, the Party needs to be ready to use it well.

[Lucia Henwood is a first year History and Economics student at Pembroke College.]