After a decade of reinvention, the British Labour Party has again fallen short electorally. Thursday last week’s dramatic loss in Hartlepool and in councils across the country has raised the perennial question for parties on the left: “What is to be done?”
Much of the discussion of Labour’s woes concentrates on British particularities, its Brexit strategy and the relative merits of the reinventions under former party leaders Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. However, the dilemmas Labour faces are far from particular. The past decade has not been kind to social democratic parties across Europe, as the center-left parties that dominated European politics for the second half of the 20th century have suffered a string of losses.
In France, the Parti Socialiste fell to under 8 percent of the vote in the most recent legislative elections, with no sign of recovery. In 2017, the German Social Democratic Party experienced its worst postwar performance, a showing likely to worsen in September’s election. Even where social democrats are in power, their position is tenuous. The Swedish Social Democrats, the most electorally successful socialist party in Europe, struggled to form a government after the 2018 election.
Too often, the debate about the failures of the left focuses on the past, asking why social democrats have lost traditional working-class voters. This kind of argument claims that social democrats have forgotten their base because they “lost their way” — moving too far to the left on new “woke” social issues, while also moving too far to the right on economic issues. This perspective is at least incomplete and often misleading.
Deep changes in Europe’s class structure mean that the appeals of the social democratic heyday are increasingly electorally limited.
As recently as the 1980s, many children left school without a qualification, fewer than half of women worked outside of the home, and working-class jobs were concentrated in heavy industry and manufacturing. Today, the population is far more educated. In the UK, as elsewhere, the share of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education qualification has risen dramatically, from 28 to 52 percent in the past 20 years. A majority of women are in paid work and much of the working class is employed in retail, hospitality and care services. These structural transformations have created new groups of voters with new economic and social concerns.
In looking at what these changing voter groups want, it is not at all the case that social democratic policies are unpopular, especially among the new middle classes. Survey after survey reaffirms that large portions of European voters support a robust welfare state, protections for workers and high-quality public services. Given the popularity of many social democratic policies, what explains their near universal decline?
Contrary to the dominant narrative, this decline is not solely attributable to the loss of working-class voters. In Europe’s proportional electoral systems, highly educated voters are overrepresented among those who turned their backs on social democratic parties. Here, social democrats have often been outcompeted by moderate right and progressive left parties. Importantly, most social democratic parties have only lost a small share of their supporters to the radical right.
Instead, social democrats have largely failed to construct an agenda that communicates a clear vision of economic policy, but is not only focused on economics.
In the arena of economic policy, social democratic parties remain a central progressive force in Europe. In Britain, through the first decade of the 2000s, Labour’s policies dramatically improved public services, cut child poverty and helped millions of low-income families. After a decade of labor market reform, the German Social Democratic Party spent the 2010s fighting to protect pensions and income security in coalition with the Christian Democratic Union. In the Nordic countries, the social democrats are robust defenders of the welfare state. However, in the post financial-crash era, they clearly offered too little to voters suffering from economic austerity, focusing on economic competence rather than a vision of a fairer future. As European center-right parties moderated their position on economic and social policies, they were able to attract centrist former social democrats.
Given that social democrats’ economic vision has been undefined, what about their social vision? A common argument is that shifting focus away from immigration, European integration and gender equality could help social democratic parties, including Labour, win back working-class voters. The rise of the new working class and the middle class means that this strategy is bound to fail in the long run. Research shows that voters who support leftist economic policies also tend to favor more equitable gender relations, racial equity and a greener future. New left and green parties have often picked up voters with these demands, further squeezing social democrats.
What is to be done? Social democratic parties need to ask themselves how they can build a broad and durable electoral coalition. They need to overcome an image of the working class as white men in the production sector with conservative cultural attitudes. Today’s working class is ethnically diverse and its members often hold progressive positions on social issues, even on the hotly contested issue of immigration.
Here, Labour is actually in a stronger position than many of its European sister parties. Labour’s mobilization through the 2010s attracted a swath of new voters. In recent elections, the average age of social democrats in France and Germany was about 57, but for Labour it was 45. The challenge the party faces is bridging this younger base with a broader appeal. The experience of US President Joe Biden and his administration suggests that articulating a more visible, progressive strategy on macro-economic policy, while supporting both organized labor and community organizations, could be a winning way forward.
Tarik Abou-Chadi is assistant professor of political science at the University of Zurich. Jane Gingrich is a professor of comparative political economy at the University of Oxford.
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