The Danish Alternative (Alternitivet). Wikipedia/public domain.If we take three major European social democratic parties: UK’s Labour, Germany’s SPD and Italy’s PD then some of you might well say – perhaps correctly – that all three are imbued with neoliberal ideas. That is to say, that they’ve forgotten their origins and that, therefore, they’re not particularly concerned with the issues of, for example, the precariat: the new struggling class masterfully depicted by the British economist Guy Standing, and others within society.
For instance, Italy’s PM Matteo Renzi, PD’s leader, showed just that with his 2014 Jobs Act, which will affect many young people negatively. Furthermore, the SPD’s opposition to the centre-right minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has, to put it mildly, not been very vocal with regards to Greece.
Across Europe new determined groups have rejected that line. While Podemos and Syriza are clearly the most conspicuous manifestations of this, you’ll also find one, for example, in seemingly unproblematic Denmark’s newly founded The Alternative. Commentators crassly label Podemos and Syriza as “radical”, having, in their minds, arbitrarily shifted the political centre elsewhere. Whatever your views, however, these two southern European parties have garnered momentum by opposing the Spanish and Greek equivalents of the big three above, PSOE and PASOK respectively.
