Back to the Future: Reflections on Prospects for the European Left

As we underlined at the beginning of the book, the actual difficulties of the Western Left parties are rooted in both their past history and their recent experiences. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the attempts made by the mainstream European Left-Wing parties to engage in a genuine reappraisal of social and political realities, or to come to terms with the economic and labour-market changes depending on globalisation, gave so far uncertain and contradictory results. This is true both for the Labour Party in England and the Partito Democratico in Italy, and for the Socialdemocratic Party in Germany, the Socialist and Workers’ Party in Spain and the Socialist Party in France. And all that happened even if these parties have taken different paths to change and increase their ability to gain support in different sectors of society. The Labour Party and the Italian PD straight took the direct route of the so-called Third way, the first inside the same political party of the past, and the second by making a party merge between the heirs of the Christian Democrat's progressist wing and of the Communists. The German Socialdemocratic Party and the Spanish Socialist and Workers’ Party preferred to undertake a relatively less conflictive strategy of both “innovation and continuity”. Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, all these parties gained good results in terms of electoral support. The France Socialist Party had instead less luck: staying more in the footsteps of the left tradition and choosing a more plural solution, it has been through a long political crisis that led it to the surprising recent electoral defeats. But beyond these alternating fortunes, in the last three decades all these parties were equally joined by a constant decline of their votes. The left's revival hinges on three crucial aspects: a clear understanding of its identity in the twenty-first century, an acknowledgement of its current state and a comprehension of the prerequisites for rejuvenation. Exploring the meaning of left and right reveals enduring tensions around nationhood and interclass cooperation versus class and internationalism. While the right embraces a coherent ideology, the left's lack of vision, exemplified by parties like Italy's PD, and Labour in the UK leads to electoral setbacks. The left's decline since the 1980s is rooted in post-Fordist economic shifts, cultural changes and the rise of populism. To rekindle its influence, the left must reassert equality, readdress globalisation's winners and losers, and champion a renewed internationalism, transcending national boundaries.