Europe's Left Offers Few Solutions to Current Crisis

Spain’s Ministry of Equality is gone now, its rainbows packed away into the gray corridors of more earthbound politics. Mark that as a blow to utopians, but even more as a defeat for European social democracy.

Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at a meeting in Brussels on Thursday.

In eliminating the ministry, and tucking its crusade for equal rights for women and gays into a subsidiary role in another department two weeks ago, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — the Spanish prime minister who’s easily the most recognizable figure among a handful of socialists still running countries in the European Union — was conceding a point and not contesting another:
The concession was that his old social democratic notions of what sounded progressive and forceful were basically not the stuff on voters’ minds during these days of profound economic insecurity.
And in juggling his cabinet and choosing hard, stability-oriented measures to keep Spain’s finances afloat, Mr. Zapatero (after regular socialism-solves-everything sound bites over six years in power) hardly seemed to challenge the idea that the European left has failed to come up with anything resembling a novel strategy to turn the economic switch back to full speed.
How do you confront low growth and, according to E.U. figures last week, a new increase in Europe-wide joblessness? Europe clearly does not say the middle-ground left has the answer.
If Mr. Zapatero is a measuring stick, his Socialist Party has only 29 percent support among voters. His own approval ranking is the lowest among Spain’s party leaders. Dangling sales of military aircraft and warships to Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and urging the E.U. to embrace the Castro brothers’ Cuba, as it turned out, couldn’t secure Mr. Zapatero’s leftist base.
If you take Germany as an example of their woe, the Social Democrats, with 23 percent poll scores, have fallen behind the Greens with 24 percent, a historical ignominy for the party of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt.
Policy Network, a center-left research organization that tracks the fortunes of European social democratic parties on a comparative basis, has found nothing to be encouraged about in its latest reading. Noting national election defeats this year in Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden, it wrote:
“There’s little sign that the center-left is regaining the confidence of the electorate, let alone presenting itself as a competent contender for power. If social democrats step back from their own national focus and look at the bigger picture, they will realize just how vulnerable and ideologically staid European social democracy as a political movement currently is.”
Even in France, where Socialist Party poll scores are good, Pierre Moscovici, a National Assembly deputy and former Socialist minister for European affairs, thinks that this may be in some part a result of current distaste in public opinion for President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Rather, Mr. Moscovici finds European social democracy is in “an unprecedented crisis. It’s stagnant. There is a leadership problem. We haven’t come up with a Europe-wide relaunch program.”
Beyond acknowledging the reality of its decline, Europe’s left has dilemmas that it finds harder to discuss.
Unlike the United States, where endemic concerns about government overspending make trouble for the left, Europe’s social democrats (and many, many politically nonaffiliated Europeans) have only faint notions of givebacks from the work force to compensate for flattened economies. For the left, in tough times, they are particularly hard to endorse.
As a result, in seeking office since 2008 without acknowledging the givebacks’ necessity, the middle-ground left to some voters has looked blindly irresponsible or traitorous to its welfare state ideology — which is the case in Spain, where Mr. Zapatero, a seeming world-beater while astride the country’s now imploded real estate and construction bubble, is attempting to bring rigor to labor market practices and cuts to retirement benefits.
Social democracy has also been particularly quiet about a re-nationalization of policy among some of its national parties and, with it, a corresponding loss of legitimacy for the idea that the left is the dominant source of solidarity among Europeans.
“Solidarity, the left’s ultimate rallying cry,” wrote Olaf Cramme, director of Policy Network, “is not in good shape at all.”
It was a German Social Democrat, Peer Steinbrück, who, as finance minister in the 2005-09 Christian Democrat-led grand coalition government, initially said that Germany would not contribute to an E.U. bailout fund because he couldn’t be sure how other members would spend the money.

E.U. Fails to Reach Agreement on Budget

BRUSSELS — Negotiations on the European Union’s budget collapsed Thursday when national governments and members of the European Parliament failed to reconcile differences brought on by the new mood of austerity sweeping the Continent.
The lack of consensus brings talks on the financing of the union in 2011 to an impasse — one that could put into question the financing of the diplomatic service that the bloc is setting up, as well as other spending projects.
The deadline for an agreement is next week, and negotiators are planning a last-ditch meeting Monday.
With many European governments forced to make cuts at home, a number of nations insisted that any rise in the bloc’s budget should be capped at 2.91 percent, rather than the 6 percent originally requested by the European Parliament.
Talks broke down Thursday when the Parliament agreed to accept the 2.91 percent increase, but only in exchange for having a say over future changes to the system, like financing the bloc through a new tax.
That proposal was rejected by national governments, as was a proposal from legislators to agree on an additional contingency fund.
The dispute has become a trial of strength between the governments and legislators, who won more powers over the E.U. budget under the bloc’s new Lisbon Treaty.
Britain, which is making vast reductions in public spending, has led resistance to big increases in the E.U. budget. At a summit meeting last month, Prime Minister David Cameron won the support of 12 countries in seeking to stop any increase above 2.91 percent.
The 6 percent increase sought by the Parliament would raise the level of spending for next year to about €130 billion, or nearly $180 billion, most of which would be directed toward farm subsidies and aid for Europe’s poorer regions.
Justine Greening, a British Treasury minister, said Thursday there would be no compromise on the 2.91 percent figure.
“At a time when many national governments, including our own, are taking tough steps to clamp down on dangerous deficits,” she said, “we thought it was unacceptable to talk about big increases in the European budget.”
If there is no breakthrough, the current level of spending will carry over into next year. But while that would mean no increase — something welcome to budgetary hawks — it could also create logistical and planning complications.
Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner responsible for the budget, said that failure to agree on a budget was “a really bad message to the European public,” adding that a deadlock could mean that financing for the new diplomatic service could be subject to legal dispute.
Alain Lamassoure, a senior legislator, accused some countries of intransigence.
“To conclude a negotiation,” he said “you have to start the negotiation.”