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Europe’s Center-Left Is Leaning More…Left
Move paid dividends in Spanish elections, where Socialists trounced conservative rivals in fragmented field
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his wife Begonia Gomez cheers to Socialist Party supporters on Sunday in Madrid. Photo: Cezaro De Luca/DPA/Zuma Press
By Giovanni Legorano
Updated April 29, 2019 6:24 a.m. ET
Europe’s center-left parties, faced with falling support, are shifting left to win back working-class voters lost to hard-left and populist movements—a move that paid off in Spain’s national elections on Sunday, where the Socialists trounced their conservative rivals.
The Socialists, who have governed since last summer, came first in a fragmented field after pitching a platform of workers’ rights, higher taxes on the wealthy and environmental protection—issues central to the party’s social-democratic roots. The party will need to form a coalition with smaller allies to reach a majority, however.
“People don’t make ends meet,” said Antonio Benítez, a 57-year-old employee of Spain’s health service, who lives in Andalusia. “It’s about time they speak about the fundamental pillars of the left, of being socialist, with none of these deviations to the center.”
Center-left parties in Germany, Italy and the U.K. are similarly attempting to lure back voters who, feeling betrayed by centrist moves that they feel have made them poorer and threatened their job security, have defected to upstart parties on the left and the right.
“We have clearly turned to the left,” said Pau Marí-Klose, a Socialist who won election to Spain’s parliament on Sunday. “Our rhetoric is highly charged with left-wing messages, adding new themes, such as precariousness and climate change. We did it to get close to the sectors who dropped us, like young people.”
The Socialists won 123 seats in Spain’s 350-seat parliament, up from 85 in the last elections in 2016, while the conservative People’s Party crashed to only 66 seats, from 137 last time. The People’s Party lost many voters to far-right movement Vox, which won 24 seats, compared with none in 2016, thanks mainly to anger among Spanish nationalists about secessionist ambitions in the region of Catalonia.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will need to build a possibly unwieldy coalition to have a parliamentary majority, however. Talks on forming a government could take many weeks.
The existential angst afflicting Europe’s center-left parties echoes the debate within the U.S. Democratic Party over how best to respond to the challenge of President Trump: Move left to win some voters at the risk of losing others, or aim for the center? In the midterm elections, Democrats brought fresh, left-wing representatives to Washington such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
When big government fell out of favor in the Cold War’s aftermath, center-left parties in the West increasingly accepted free-market economic thinking, while seeking to smooth the rough edges of capitalism rather than radically changing it.
In Europe, leaders such as the U.K.’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder led a shift away from generous welfare states and state intervention toward deregulation, privatization and competition. Center-left leaders in France, Italy, Spain and other Western countries followed.
Over time, working-class voters in Europe saw the parties they traditionally supported as increasingly out of touch with common people. Supporters felt betrayed when some, such as Spain’s Socialists and Italy’s Democrats, supported welfare cuts to shore up government finances in the wake of the financial crisis.
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Populists of the far left and the far right have made inroads among disillusioned voters with attacks on the establishment, accelerating the collapse of the traditional European center-left.
“It’s like these parties received a blow to their heads and got disoriented,” said Catherine De Vries, a political scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam. “Some of them decided to shift back to their core values to win back voters.”
The U.K. Labour Party, bruised by its unexpected defeat in the 2015 general election, was among the first to move left. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn drew thousands of young party members with his antiausterity and antiwar messages. He also has embraced the re-nationalization of the water and rail industries. In the U.K. general elections in 2017, Labour won 40% of the vote, up from 30% in 2015, but still came in second to the ruling Conservative Party.
“Socialism has come back onto the agenda,” said John McDonnell, a Labour Party politician.
Germany’s center-left Social Democrats, or SPD, and Italy’s Democratic Party are turning away from pro-business economic policies they steadily implemented in the past two decades, after losing a string of elections.
In 2017, the SPD scored its worst postwar result in a general election, after losing many voters who had grown disillusioned with its centrist course on economics. The left-leaning Greens and the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, both made significant gains.
In Italy, the Democratic Party has lost votes since 2013 to the antiestablishment 5 Star Movement and the hard-right League, who together now lead a coalition government. Among the Democrats’ policies that alienated longtime voters were pension overhauls that raised the retirement age. The Democratic Party’s popular support has halved since Spring 2014, when it garnered 41% in European elections, compared with a 21% showing in an average of recent surveys by pollsofpolls.eu.
Laborers collect melons in the agricultural region of El Campo de Cartagena in 2017, a region that was close to ecological collapse due to a long drought. Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images
Nicola Zingaretti, the newly elected leader of the Democrats, said he is considering an electoral alliance with lawmakers who left his party over policies they found too centrist, such as rules that made firing workers easier. Italy’s youth unemployment is more than 30%.
“Populist forces have done better than progressives due to a desire for greater fairness,” Mr. Zingaretti said in mid-April. “We need to go back, and talk to these people, to these workers, whose votes we lost.”
Mr. Sánchez raised Spain’s minimum wage by 22% around Christmas, in a move that resonated with lower-income Spaniards. His campaign themes of workers’ rights and higher taxes on corporations marked a contrast with Spain’s previous Socialist premier, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who said more than a decade ago that “cutting taxes is left-wing.”
Write to Giovanni Legorano at giovanni.legorano@wsj.com
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