Roll the film about ten years back. In a lunch break of the doomed partijraad (a national delegates assembly abandoned to the relief of many) of my dutch green political party, somebody asked me about our future. Would we made it through the next election? Of course, I didn’t know. But what I did know was that the ones that were not going to make it were the social and christian democrats. Why? did my companion ask. My answer, the one that I would still give nowadays, is that the model of country that both social democrats and christian democrats have, is already done. In Europe is more or less a success, the so called welfare state. In South America it is a great failure. Yet all the same, is not the future. And political parties only make sense when they offer a future. It might be a bad future, like the nightmarish dreams of a white europe without migrants by the current right, or it might be an impossible future, like the unbelievable promises of the Brexit party. But a future has to be. And what the social democrats offer, what the christian democrats stand for, has already happened, or already failed.
This piece of political forecasting did bear well for few years. Indeed, ever since, at many levels and in many countries the social and christian democrats have been in free fall, being eaten up by populists of both the right and the left. Yet the last results of elections both in the northern Denmark and in the southern Spain, have seen the social democrats raise from their own ashes. Are they offering something new, anew? Or have I been wrong all the time along? What makes this renewal even more interesting is that, at least at a first look, the narratives of the spaniards success are very different than the ones of the danish.
As far as I can see, the wins of the spanish PSOE are a bit of a coming back to normality for the Spanish people. In the recent past fairly shocking developments have taken place in their political landscape. Spain is one of the few mayor countries of Europe whose government used to be a monolithic one party business. This being made possible, of course, by the existence of only two main parties. Podemos irruption few years back galvanized the left, creating unthinkable coalitions and gaining relevant spaces of power, like the mayorships of both Barcelona and Madrid (even if the mayors were independent figures). To this already new landscape recently the hard and far right VOX was added. With a message at the right of most of the european right, VOX also collected support from a relevant percentage of the population. So the social democrats were, after all, not such a bad choice, even if they would not have anything new to offer: faced with the internally warring far left Podemos and their charismatic but populist leader on one side, and with the straight racist VOX at the other, the PSOE seemed to be a decent moderate option. In times of radicalization then, at least for a while, it’s the moderates who keep power spaces.
Now, at the north the tale seems to be different. There is a growing consensus about migrants being the sacrificial lamb that social democrats paid to come back to power. Indeed, their program contains ideas as repugnant as to stripe asylum seekers of any valuables that they might still have, in order to pay for the costs of their hosting. The idea behind this tack to the right being that the traditional electorate of the social democrats, the worker class (whatever that might be nowadays) has trouble with migration. So a hardened stance would be enough to regain those strangled voters. |Open your newspaper and you will find a version of this narrative. Even before considering how low is to objectify migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular in order to gain votes or to describe how votes are gained, consider that the data might tell a different tale. The social democrat share of the votes has not even reach their previous levels, meanwhile other parties at the left have grown harder than ever before. The last minute decisions that triggered individual Danes to vote for one or another option are beyond my ken, yet it seems that a hardened instance on migration by a center party, make other left wing parties took the traditional social democrat voter, meanwhile the social democrats took votes from the center right and the liberals.
So what is it then? Are the social democrats happy center holders, with the destiny of win elections as long as they remain moderate, as the spanish case suggest? Or is the future of the social democracy being nimble enough to follow whatever societal trend… trends!?
I’m afraid that my answer stays similar to the one that I produced about a decade ago. The social democracy was an invention, an attempt to achieve a level of societal justice that has been reasonably achieved, at least for a relevant part of europeans. As long as their leaders forget it and turn their backs on the dispossessed, or remain confortable in between worrying factions of other forces, they might win one or few more governments. But as long as they do not produce new and authentic answers to the questions that keep us busy today, at best they will be able to modulate one government or another. But to lead? Nope.
