European Socialist Parties Trends: Where Socialdemocratic Parties Are Going After the Berlin Wall Crash

The actual difficulties of the left parties are rooted in both their past history and their recent experiences. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the European left appears still to be attempting to make up for lost time: the collapse of a vision of the world and of political objectives inspired by the values of socialism and communism should have led, in the Western Europe, to a general reconceptualisation of the nature of both the left and political project it needed to devise in pursuit of social and political change, by defeating exclusions and inequalities. This trend affects both Italy and UK, as two countries where the main left-wing parties explicitly choice the so-called Third Way. In the first case, concerning the Partito Democratico, by promoting the birth of a new merger party between Ds (Democrats of Left) and Margherita (Daisy). In the second case, concerning the Labour Party, by promoting a political and organisational change, under the banner of the so-called Third Way, inside that party itself. Similar trends happened in other European countries, for instance in Germany, where the Socialdemocratic Party led by Schroeder took the run of the so-called Neue Mitte, and in Spain, where under the Zapatero’s leadership the Spanish Socialist and Workers’ Party inaugurated the season of the so-called Nueva Via. A different path was instead followed by France, where the Socialist Party, after the defeat of Jospin in the 2002 presidential election, because of the high fragmentation that characterised the so-called Gauche pluriel, took a different way, remaining strongly divided by very deep conflicts within it. As we can see, in all these European countries, such as UK, Italy, Germany and Spain, the main left-wing parties attempted the way of a new socialism founded on hybridisation with the liberal tradition, thus making an effort to counter the current crisis. In France, on the other hand, the path token by the left parties was different and led to the defeat of the 2017 presidential election, won by Macron, once he left the PSF making a new political movement called “La République En Marche”. This chapter aims to synthetically reconstruct these events, focussing mainly both on the tendencies of the electoral consensus that have characterised these left parties in the last thirty years and on the perceptions of their voters, as they are no longer so close to the kind of policies and society they would like to achieve.