Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa speaks during a bi-monthly debate at the Portuguese parliament,Lisbon in March, 2018. NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved. Across the European continent, support for the populist radical right has increased over the last three decades. Even in countries that had seemed immune to such tendencies for decades, including Finland, Sweden and, above all, Germany, right-wing populist parties have made their way into the political arena. On the other side of the political spectrum, support for centre-left parties appears to be in free fall. Following the substantial losses suffered by social democratic parties in the Netherlands, France and Germany, the Italian centre-left Democratic Party (PD) was recently outflanked by populists by losing nearly 7 percentage points (down to 19 percent overall) in the 2018 general elections. In the light of these developments, the future looks bleak for the mainstream left.
The decline of Europe’s social democrats on the one hand, and the surge of the far right, on the other, tend to be presented as two correlated trends. However, electoral politics is not a zero-sum-game where gains made by one party can simply be explained by the losses of another. While social democratic parties have suffered major blows in numerous countries, they are not in decline everywhere. Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour Party has crowned itself a ‘government-in-waiting’ after booking a net gain of 30 seats by winning 40 percent of the vote in the 2017 general elections – their strongest result since 2001. On the continent, the Walloon Parti Socialiste remains the largest party in francophone Belgium, despite losing support earlier this year over a series of corruption scandals. Meanwhile, the mainstream left is flourishing in Portugal. It is clearly too early to bid farewell to social democracy.
Party systems across Europe have become more fragmented, thereby making electoral politics increasingly volatile and hence less predictable. Moreover, the decline of the mainstream left cannot simply be attributed to the rise of the radical right. Social democratic parties have lost votes to parties across the political spectrum. In sum, political fragmentation affects all parties, and the vote-swing from social democrats to the populist radical right should not be exaggerated.
