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.
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.
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