Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527); Abraham Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaie (1634-1706): Wikicommons/ Peace Palace Library. Some rights reserved.In the aftermath of another round of elections across Europe, we are left to wonder whether reports of the death of the Left might have been not at all exaggerated. As professor Sheri Berman observes in an op-ed contribution for The New York Times, the historic defeat of the German Social-democratic Party (SPD) in the last federal elections could have marked the end of the political framework that has shaped European societies since the end of World War II.
Such a framework has rested on two pillars, i.e. a social-democratic and a conservative pole, which have been able to compete for government, by articulating clearly distinct sets of policies, while agreeing on the basic tenets of liberal, capitalist democracy. However, the first pillar is now crumbling, which is paving the way for the rise of national-populist parties. Those parties have indeed succeeded in appealing to social and demographic groups that had historically supported not only the Social Democrats, but the Left in general, such as “blue collar” workers, students, public employees and young voters.
This last point encourages us to draw two alarming conclusions. First, the crisis of social-democratic parties is nothing but the tip of the iceberg, the base of which consists precisely in the crisis of the whole Left, ranging from classical Social Democracy, to green and post- or neo-communist parties. Second, such a crisis is not only political, since it impinges on the very social basis of progressive politics. Those conclusions are further supported by the results of the last Austrian general elections, as reported by Benjamin Opratko in The Jacobin: the right block, comprised of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the traditionally mainstream conservative, yet now more right-wing than ever, Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), won a combined share of 57.5 percent of the vote, i.e. 103 out of 183 MPs. Austria has thus elected the most right-wing parliament since 1945. Moreover, significant sectors of the Austrian Left have pandered to the prevailing populist rhetoric and xenophobic sentiments, such as the Social-democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and the newly founded “Liste Pilz” (“Pilz’s List”), run by former Green politician Peter Pilz. Further to the left, the Austrian Greens fell below the 4 percent threshold, thus failing to elect any MP, whereas the alliance forged by the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), the Greens’ former youth branch and self-styled leftists earned less than 1 percent of the vote. The picture could hardly have been bleaker.
