New Labour and the Italian PD

This chapter discusses “New Labour”, considering the similarities with the PD and therefore the extent to which an understanding of the former helps us to understand the latter. The first section places the two parties in context by discussing the overlap between their electoral trajectories and those of European parties of the mainstream left generally. The second considers why “New Labour” ultimately failed to bring about any lasting change in the fortunes of the left in the UK. The third considers the PD, arguing that its failure, hitherto, to realise a majoritarian vocation, has at least in part to do with matters very similar to those that account for the failure of “New Labour”. The final section concludes. It will suggest that both New Labour and the Partito Democratico provide examples of mainstream left parties which, having embraced neo-liberal ideological assumptions, becoming converts to the causes of deregulation and a reduced welfare state, faced electoral calamity as a result, losing vast numbers of their erstwhile supporters (the so-called losers of globalisation) to the Eurosceptical, populist right—with the resulting Brexit catastrophe in the UK and the consolidation of the far-right League and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy.