I have been struck by the fact that parties on the left have not only failed to gain politically by the global economic collapse, they have, in fact, been punished. Recent elections in Germany and Portugal have seen the Social Democrats take a beating. And it is accepted wisdom that the British Labour Party will be voted out of office when the next general election occurs, sometime by next June.
You would expect that this catastrophic failure of free market capitalism would provide fodder for the left critique of conservative economic policies. Instead, voters all over the world seem to be moving further to the left? How could that be?
In today’s Financial Times, John Lloyd takes a crack at an explanation. He believes that parties on the left are, in fact, gaining support. But it is the center left that is being punished. He suggests that, because the center left supports free market capitalism, but only seeks a more humane version, it is implicated in the economic collapse. Moreover, he posits that the center left parties are victims of their own success. Much of their non-economic agenda has been adopted by the right, so there’s nothing to fight about. As he puts it:
The great causes – race, women’s and homosexual equality, community involvement, the spread of democratic practice – which had been significantly dominated by the left, are now largely uncontroversial on the western European right, except on its fringes and in parts of Italy’s governing coalition.
Clearly, the political consequences of the economic crisis will play out over months, if not years. But, just as the collapse itself was unexpected, so too are the political reverberations.
