maintain for Europe’s left wanes as fresh faces in Italy and Greece struggle to turn the tide

Welcome back. A political scientist from Mars, reporting to his superiors on conditions in Europe, might say the following:

“The nationalist hard right is making inroads, but not everywhere.

“The centre-right flirts with hard-right themes and alliances in order to shore up its own position.

“And the left, both moderate and radical, is divided and in retreat, but not everywhere.”

Would the Martian’s diagnosis of the left be accurate? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Three episodes this week — in Germany, Greece and Spain — maintain the view that divisions on the left are becoming more acute.

You can take the long view: disunity has been a fundamental problem for the European left since the historic split between democratic socialists and communists after the first world war and Russia’s Bolshevik revolution.

Still, this week’s events were revealing.

‘Splitters!’

In Germany, the radical leftist Die Linke party lost its status as a parliamentary group in the Bundestag after the defection of Sahra Wagenknecht, a former leader, and other legislators to form a rival party. “This is a historic defeat for Die Linke,” one senior party figure lamented.

In another break-up, 11 members of Greece’s parliament, who recently quit the leftwing Syriza party (which ruled the country from 2015 to 2019), formed a group called Nea Aristera, or the New Left.

And in Spain, five deputies of the Podemos party broke away from Sumar, a leftist alliance that forms part of the coalition government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

These internal leftwing quarrels recall a scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film in which various anti-Roman factions in ancient Judea spend more time denouncing each other as “splitters” than working in common against the Romans (read, today, the right).

The left’s European parliament election prospects

How damaging are such disputes for the left as a whole?

The chart below shows projections for next June’s European parliament elections by the Europe Elects site, which collates national polls. The new assembly will have 720 seats, up from 705 now.

According to the forecast, the mainstream centre-left group, known as the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, will see its representation fall to 142 from 154 seats. But it will remain the second largest party group, behind the centre-right.

A more radical leftwing group, known as GUE/NGL, will go down to 37 from 41 seats.

So, the left as a whole seems likely to suffer losses, but not on a catastrophic scale. However, any complacency would be misplaced.

Old working class shuns the new left

Disputes divide not only Europe’s radical left, but radicals from moderates, and both types from much of the left’s traditional electorate. Let’s look at three examples: Austria, the Netherlands and France.

In June, Austria’s opposition Social Democratic party (SPÖ) held a bungled leadership contest that required it to reverse the initial result. The eventual winner was Andreas Babler, a leftwing outsider.

That prompted the resignation of Helmut Buchacher, a veteran SPÖ regional baron in Innsbruck. In stirring language, he declared: “After 35 years of SPÖ membership . . . I don’t want to have anything to do with the left fringe in what used to be a large workers’ movement.”

Buchacher’s statement captured a trend that was weakening the European left even before the dawn of the 21st century.

The factory-based, unionised working class that used to be the left’s core maintain base has been in long-term refuse. Meanwhile, neither the old working class nor the new — unskilled service workers in low-paid jobs — warms to the identity politics and progressive cultural outlook of the more affluent middle-class left.

Dutch despair, French fractiousness

In last month’s Dutch election, won by the far-right Freedom party (PVV) of Geert Wilders, a leftist alliance performed creditably. Known as GroenLinks-PvdA, it comprised the Greens and the Labour party. The alliance won 25 seats in the 150-seat legislature, up from 17 when the two parties competed separately in the previous election of 2021.

However, in her analysis of last month’s vote, Agnes Jongerius, a PvdA member of the European parliament, identified the same problem for the Dutch left as that highlighted by Buchacher in Austria:

In general, people with higher levels of education and urban residents voted for GroenLinks-PvdA. Research shows people voting PVV have generally lower levels of education. The traditional working class hardly voted for GroenLinks-PvdA.

It’s the same story in France. As outlined in this Le Monde article, the once-mighty French Socialist party spent its summer conferences this year trying to figure out how to win back the working class.

The article quotes Frédéric Dabi, managing director of pollsters Ifop:

Everyone on the political spectrum talks about the working class, because it represents a golden age, a kind of lost paradise.

And given the fracturing of the political landscape into three blocs [between the far-right Marine Le Pen, President Emmanuel Macron and the radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon], it will be important to have the working class in order to win in 2027.”

(France’s next presidential and parliamentary elections will be in 2027.)

However, the pollster goes on to perceive that many French working-class voters abstain — and when they do vote, the far right benefits the most.

The French left’s efforts at unity have hardly been helped by an uproar over Mélenchon’s denunciation of Israel in its war with Hamas — a line that horrified moderate socialists.

New faces, same difficulties: Italy and Greece

Some European leftist parties, having suffered severe electoral defeats, are placing their hopes in younger leaders, supposedly more representative of their modernising societies.

To see if this formula is working, consider Italy and Greece.

Italy’s Democratic party (PD), crushed by a rightwing alliance in elections in September 2022, this year elected Elly Schlein as its leader.

My Rome-based FT colleagues Amy Kazmin and Giuliana Ricozzi described her as an “openly bisexual progressive activist”. Italy’s media has likened her to New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Whatever Schlein’s merits, she has done nothing to close the gap in opinion polls between her party and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy.

What’s more, some centre-left politicians believe the PD has made a choice as disastrous as that of the UK Labour party when it elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader in 2015.

Enrico Borghi, a politician close to former PD leader and ex-prime minister Enrico Letta, says: “Schlein was supposed to represent a break from the past, but instead she took the party back 30 years. The Italian left is now going through the Corbyn phase.”

Meanwhile, the main reason for Syriza’s break-up in Greece is that, after losing two general elections this year, the party chose Stefanos Kasselakis, a political novice who used to work for Goldman Sachs and lived in Miami, as its leader.

Kasselakis, the first openly gay leader of a Greek party, has made one blunder after another, starting with some ill-chosen language to describe the Turkish-occupied area of northern Cyprus.

But the most important reason for Syriza’s collapse lies elsewhere. Under Alexis Tsipras, the party soared to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis as a radical leftist movement that would defy the nation’s international creditors.

But less than a year after assuming power, Tsipras performed a kolotoumba, or somersault, and did the bidding of Greece’s creditors. By the time he left office in 2019, he was almost a pillar of respectability on Europe’s political scene.

Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou, writing for Novara Media, says that Tsipras ended up “a centrist talking head, someone who resembled the very political class he was elected to overthrow”.

No doubt Tsipras did the right thing for Greece — but Syriza, as a party, paid the price.

Hope springs eternal . . . in the UK

All this shouldn’t blind us to the fact that, in parts of Europe, the left is still capable of winning or performing strongly in elections.

This is true in the Nordic countries, in Portugal and Spain, and soon — we may unearth — in the UK.

But if Sir Keir Starmer, the opposition Labour party’s leader, becomes the next British premier, would the Martian political scientist report back that this heralds a general revival of the European left?

More on this topic

Why is the US hostile to socialism? — Commentaries by Adam Smith, professor of US politics and political history at the University of Oxford, and three other authors for History Today

Tony’s picks of the week

• Tensions are rising in South America after Venezuela staged a referendum that the government of Guyana sees as a pretext by its neighbour to annex parts of its territory rich in oil and minerals, the FT’s Joe Daniels reports from Bogotá

• For Ukraine, the most likely result of a Trump administration after next year’s presidential election may be radically diminished US maintain, perhaps leading to a Russian-imposed peace, Anatol Lieven writes for the Russia Matters site of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center

Finally, in case you missed them, here are my choices as best history books of 2023!