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EU Elections Show Why the Left Can't Win by Running Rightward
The left can take on both the center and the right by presenting a unified front, energizing new voters, and resisting the temptation to soften their positions.
Jun 21, 2024
The recent European Parliamentary elections went poorly for the region’s leftist parties, to say the least.
All across the continent, socialist, worker, and environmentalist parties—many of which had risen from the ashes of the Eurozone crisis—lost ground as far-right authoritarian parties picked up new support.
The Greens, primary architects of the European Union’s ambitious Green Deal, lost 19 seats of the 70 they had secured in a triumphant 2019 election. And while the Left coalition in parliament actually gained two seats to control 39 of the 720 available, the country-by-country results paint a darker picture.
The left has historically had success mobilizing those that are frustrated with the political system—and they should be unwilling to cede those potential voters to the far right.
In my native Spain, Podemos only managed a meager 3.3% of the vote, down from over 10% at their apex in 2019. Syriza, which briefly turned Greece into an epicenter of the European left, only pulled in 14.7% support, a far cry from their first place finish at nearly 24% in 2014.
And in France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National party beat the field so badly that President Emanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections.
The overall results of the European Parliamentary elections—where millions of citizens across the European Union’s 27 member states voted to fill one of the bloc’s three legislative bodies—actually went slightly better than some observers feared. The moderate coalition of the conservative European People’s Party, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, and the weakened liberal Renew Europe party looks poised to maintain leadership, although the far right’s influence over the body undoubtedly grew.
The two far-right groups in parliament—Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists Party and Marine Le Pen’s more eurosceptic Identity and Democracy party—gained a combined 16 seats. Although an alliance is not on the horizon as of now with the two parties differing over the role of the E.U., together their bloc would nearly match the center left coalition.
And that’s not counting Alternative for Germany (AfD) which, despite being kicked out of Le Pen’s coalition after a leader suggested that Nazi SS officers were not necessarily criminals, placed second in Germany ahead of Prime Minister Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats.
After a setback of this magnitude, a period of reflection and restrategizing will no doubt take place. But as they grapple with a rising far right, the last thing Europe’s leftist parties should do is shift to the right themselves.
How can leftists in Europe beat back the rise of the anti-immigrant, ethnonationalist right and wrest power from centrist parties that are already pledging to weaken climate commitments? Present a unified front, energize new voters, and resist the temptation to soften their positions.
Presenting a United Front
The story of the left in Europe over the past decade is one headlined by infighting and fragmentation.
Spain’s Podemos, the left-wing faction borne out of the anti-austerity “15-M protests” starting in 2011, has faced several fractures since performing well enough to form part of the ruling coalition. The split off of Más Madrid, the marriage and subsequent divorce from Izquierda Unida, and the formation of the new progressive coalition Sumar have all resulted in Spanish voters not having a clear leftist option at the ballot.
In Germany, former parliamentary co-speaker and representative from the leftist Die Linke party Sahra Wagenknecht broke away to launch her own party with a more nationalist-populist appeal. That left Die Linke scrambling to survive and opened the door for the AfD to be one of the only viable options for voters outside of the political mainstream.
People can still be motivated to participate in politics when presented with compelling reasons.
There are often legitimate disagreements between leftist parties. But working through those without breaking off into separate factions will almost certainly put the left in a stronger position.
France provides a compelling example for that strategy. Following Macron’s call for snap elections, the country’s Socialists, Greens, Communists, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s progressive La France Insoumise party have come together to form the Nouveau Front Populaire, a coalition that despite internal differences has a common program.
Early returns on that joint bid are promising—although Le Pen’s party is polling in first place on around 31%, the new front is only a few percentage points behind. Macron’s Renaissance party is polling a distant 10 points behind.
The French case also shows that despite poor turnout in the European elections—roughly 50% of the over 400 million eligible voters in the continent cast ballots—people can still be motivated to participate in politics when presented with compelling reasons. Over a quarter million people—or closer to 700,000, according to the labor unions—flooded the streets of France after the elections to make their voices heard against the looming threat of the right.
As Sophie Binet, leader of the left-wing CGT union which helped lead the protests, said, “It’s our responsibility to build the popular wave that will block the far right.”
Sticking to Principles
The left has historically had success mobilizing those that are frustrated with the political system—and they should be unwilling to cede those potential voters to the far right. But neither can Europe’s leftist parties fall into the trap of shifting right themselves to steal a handful of votes from other parties.
As Manon Aubry, the co-chair of the Left group in the European Parliament, toldJacobin, “We spent too much time trying to protect ourselves from the reactionary agenda. We should also be offensive.”
One issue that Aubry suggests leftists could make a bigger wedge out of? Reining in out of control wealth concentration. A “tax the rich” agenda, she explained in the same interview, can inspire “most of the people who suffer from the increase of prices: The superrich have never been so rich, this is time to say stop to that.”
Instead of accommodating the right, Europe’s leftist parties should take their largely disappointing results this month as an opportunity to refocus on the core issues that matter to the working class.
To the contrary, shifting to the right in the face of growing authoritarianism can actually end up boosting that movement.
In a study published in 2022, researchers found that accommodating the far right on an issue like immigration—the unifying enemy of Europe’s right—does nothing to tamper its rise and can even help it grow. “By legitimizing a framing that is associated with the radical right, mainstream politicians can end up contributing to its success,” the researchers wrote in The Guardian.
Even if triangulating could work in the short term, would it be worth it? Seeing as the European Parliament’s center right party, emboldened by the newly more conservative makeup of the body, has already pledged to do away with a key pillar of the European Green Deal—banning the sale of combustion engines starting in 2035—the answer seems to be no.
There are several cases around Europe which show that sticking to positions can pay off electorally.
Take a look at Denmark, where the Social Democrats led by current prime minister Mette Frederiksen have adopted increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the decade since the far-right Danish People’s Party burst onto the scene. They finished behind the first-place Socialist People’s Party in this month’s elections.
France again shows this dynamic of centrist parties tightening their stances on immigration yet failing to break voters away from the far right—the showing of Macron’s Renaissance party was more than doubled up by Le Pen’s party despite Macron signing an immigration bill almost copied from her.
One of the biggest surprises of the election came in Finland, where the socialist Left Alliance pulled in 17.3% of the vote running on a platform that party leader Li Andersson described as combining “ambitious environmental and climate policy with the traditional themes of the Left: workers’ rights, investment in welfare services, equal distribution of income.”
The electoral gains of the Workers Party of Belgium and Austrian Communist Party in this election are further proof of the value of focusing on core working-class issues.
There’s Nothing Inevitable About the Far Right
While the rise of the authoritarian right in Europe has been alarming, it is by no means guaranteed. But if the centrist coalition that has held down leadership of the bloc for decades keeps shifting rightward on key issues like immigration and climate, it risks losing—or else helping the far right achieve its goals without even having to win itself.
Instead of accommodating the right, Europe’s leftist parties should take their largely disappointing results this month as an opportunity to refocus on the core issues that matter to the working class. By doubling down on principles and putting aside minor differences to present a unified front, the left can provide a tangible, substantively different answer to the rise of fascism on the continent.
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What’s at Stake in the 2024 European Parliament Elections?
An interview with C. J. Polychroniou.
Jun 08, 2024
Europeans go to polls this week to vote for parliament. What is at stake? Is the future of the European Union at risk on account of the surge of the far right? But is the E.U. even a democratic institution worth saving? And why is the left in crisis across Europe?
Political economist and political scientist C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek independent journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: Elections for the European parliament are taking place this week from Thursday 6 June to Sunday 10 June. Some 373 million citizens across the 27 members of the E.U. are eligible to vote, but it remains to be seen whether the “surge” in participation in 2019 will continue in 2024. Let’s talk about participation in the world’s only transnational elections because the general impression is that Europeans do not take the European Parliament (EP) elections very seriously.
C.J. Polychroniou: Participation in E.U. elections has always been low. We saw a “surge” in participation in the 2019 EP elections in which just slightly over 50% of E.U. citizens cast a vote. And this was the highest turnout in 20 years. So, yes, it’s obvious that Europeans are not as excited about E.U. elections as they are about national elections. Votes to the European Parliament also tend to be uncorrelated to national elections in the various member states. They are really low-turnout protest votes. And the reason that Europeans do not take the EP elections seriously is because they are fully aware of the E.U.’s democratic deficit.
Unfortunately, there is much to be said about the E.U. being in essence a corporate-driven entity with power vested in an unelected and unaccountable elite.
The EP is the only directly elected E.U. body, yet its authority is extremely limited. Unlike national parliaments, it cannot initiate legislation. What it does is simply debate legislation and can pass or reject laws. It can also make some amendments. It is the European Commission that is solely responsible for planning, preparing, and proposing new European laws. Those laws are then debated and adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union which consists of one government minister from each member state (and is not to be confused with the European Council which consists of the heads of government of every E.U. country). Essentially, we are talking about a rubber-stamping exercise on the part of the EP with regard to legislation. The European Commission is the E.U.’s executive body, surrounded by some 32,000 permanent bureaucrats, but the European Council is the highest political entity of the union. The commission president is proposed by the European Council and then approved by the Parliament.
In sum, the EP is not a normal legislature and is clearly the weakest of the three main institutions of the E.U. Brussels is also the home of European lobbying. There are more than 30,000 lobbyists in town, most of whom represent the interests of corporations, and they work very closely with E.U. bureaucrats and politicians. Lobby groups are involved at all levels of lawmaking. So, unfortunately, there is much to be said about the E.U. being in essence a corporate-driven entity with power vested in an unelected and unaccountable elite. By the same token, countries like Germany, Europe’s economic and political powerhouse, have a lot to answer for. Germany has refused to “think European” with regard to E.U. reform, particularly on economic restructuring, solidarity, and social cohesion. Its policies have created a major rift between Northern and Southern Europe that is having far-reaching effects on the nature of the mission of the Union.
Alexandra Boutri: There is a general feeling however that this year’s E.U. elections are different. They matter because of the surge of far-right ideology across Europe. What’s at stake with the 2024 European Parliament elections, and why is the far right thriving across Europe?
C. J. Polychroniou: What one hears from European heads of government and E.U. enthusiasts in general is that the 2024 E.U. elections are crucial because they will have an impact on the E.U.’s response to the increase in democratic backsliding. To be sure, there is serious democratic backsliding across Europe. And I am not talking about the usual suspects like Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban. We have seen, for instance, how so-called liberal European democracies like Germany responded to people protesting Israel’s mass killings in Gaza. The German government has cracked down on pro-Palestine protests, raided the homes of activists, and banned speakers from the country. In Greece, its right-wing Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis publicly boasted that his government will not tolerate university students setting encampments in support of Palestine and even took the outrageous step of trying to deport students from the U.K. and European Union member states that took part last month in a pro-Palestinian demonstration rally at Athens Law School. It is quite an irony indeed to hear European leaders urging citizens not only to cast a vote but to act “responsibly” in this year’s E.U. elections. For them, apparently, democracy exists only when citizens align their views with existing government positions on domestic and foreign affairs!
Having said that, the surge of the far right across Europe is a very serious and dangerous matter. The far right poses a threat to the survival of democracy in every country in which it happens to have a large presence. I am less concerned about its threat to the E.U. than the threat that the far-right ideology poses to the democratic development of domestic society.
The rise of the far right in Europe is driven by several factors. The first is fear of economic insecurity. There has been a fundamental shift in recent decades away from the social policies of the post-war era to a ruthless form of capitalism that exploits insecurities, produces staggering inequality, and exacerbates people’s anxieties about the future. The far right taps into people’s fears, insecurities, and grievances with promises of a return to a golden past and a restoration of “law and order.” It uses everywhere it flourishes ultra-nationalist and xenophobic language but in many, though not all, cases utilizes the context of an economic policy platform which is against austerity and open to social public spending for working-class people. The radical right-wing parties in France, Italy, and Finland, for example, are hostile to neoliberalizing reforms and E.U.-level austerity. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has managed to create the image of being a “working-class” party.
The second factor is disillusionment with the E.U. and with established policies. For many European voters, both the E.U. and mainstream political parties (center-right and center-left political parties) work directly against the interests of the common people and serve instead the interests of the few. Another factor is of course Europe’s failed migration policies, though there is no mechanical link between immigration and the surge of the far right.
Alexandra Boutri: Can you elaborate a bit on this? Because there is a widespread impression that immigration is the cause behind the surge of the far right.
C. J. Polychroniou: Immigration is having an effect on right-wing and extreme right-wing voting. That’s an undeniable fact. But the whole issue is quite complicated. It’s not a clear-cut case that immigration itself is what’s driving support (which is strongest, incidentally, among people of low income and with few educational opportunities) for the far right. For instance, some studies have shown that unskilled workers feel threatened by the presence of unskilled or low-skilled immigrants from outside of Europe simply because they feel unprotected but that “high-skilled immigration from non-European countries has a negative impact on extreme right-wing parties.” Thus, the formation of anti-immigrant sentiments may be related to the degree of economic and social integration of immigrants.
it appears that in times of economic downturn, voters turn to the right, not to the left, for solutions to their problems.
But there is an irony here. The E.U. as such has no integration policy. What it has is a strategy of migrant containment, and “integration” depends entirely on the member states, with national governments defining and applying the term differently.
Other studies have shown that certain demographic factors, such as emigration (the movement of people out of a region) may also be fueling the spread of anti-immigrant far-right parties. As young people leave the smaller towns in which they grew up for better opportunities in major cities, the regions they leave behind experience a rise in support for extreme right-wing parties due to the negative effects of local population decline and the subsequent deterioration of these regions. Sweden, not long ago dominated by the Social Democratic party, seems to provide the perfect example for the link between emigration and the surge of the far right.
Alexandra Boutri: European left-wing forces are in crisis. Why is that, especially since the socioeconomic environment in Europe is quite depressing? Shouldn’t one expect the radical left, and not the far right, to be thriving under dire economic conditions?
C. J. Polychroniou: The mainstream left is clearly in decline. By that I mean social democratic and socialist parties. That’s your mainstream left. But then the question is what do we mean by “radical left?” Do we include parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain in the camp of the “radical left?” I think it would be a crude joke to do so. Some anti-systemic movements of the left are out there, but they are very small and fractured. In Greece, there are scores of radical left parties and organizations, but with few followers and yet it’s impossible to get them to agree to the formation of a United Front. You encounter the same phenomenon in many other European countries. It is a sad and disconcerting state of affairs.
The reasons for the crisis of the left are political and ideological in nature and scope, and they deserve an in-depth discussion which cannot be done here. However, I think there is a real misunderstanding on the part of the left about economic uncertainty and political preferences. Scholars who have studied the effects of economic crises on voting behavior found that it is extreme right-wing parties that tend to benefit from the effects of macroeconomic shocks. Of course, there are other variables at play when examining individual case studies where economic crises lead to political support for the extreme right, such as the nature of the political culture in place and the organizational skills of left parties and movements in existence. But, on the whole, it appears that in times of economic downturn, voters turn to the right, not to the left, for solutions to their problems.
Today this is even more understandable when the left has nothing concrete to offer to Europe’s citizens. In France, people cite inflation and security as their main concerns. And opinion polls show that the National Rally has a lead ahead of the E.U. vote. But I am not sure to what extent the left understands why it is failing to convince citizens why they should vote for it, and not the forces of reaction.
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Western Leaders Are Exploiting Yesterday’s Genocide to Commit Another Today
U.S. political and media elites are—shrewdly, if cruelly—re-traumatizing Jews for the most cynical reason imaginable: to help them aid and abet the unconscionable actions of a foreign country.
Jun 07, 2024
It takes a lot of people to mount a genocide: planners, funders, pathologically uncaring politicians, and big-money donors who have corrupted the political process. It also requires an armada of social-media sociopaths willing to call for slaughter from the comfort of their homes.
But the ongoing murder in Gaza wouldn’t be possible if a lot of ordinarily reasonable and empathetic people hadn’t been manipulated by cynics who prey on their collective trauma. The ghosts of past horrors have been summoned, not to end genocide but to perpetrate it in a new context.
There are many Jews in the West, including the children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, whose inherited pain is being exploited in service of a ruthless military agenda.
Ghosts of Horror
I’ve heard from American Jews who are genuinely frightened. They’ve been told there’s a dramatic upsurge of antisemitism in the United States, especially among those who are least likely to be antisemitic in this society—people of all faiths and backgrounds who are calling for an end to occupation and genocide.
Jews born in the 1930s and earlier lived with the knowledge that their own people were being systematically exterminated. They absorbed the shock as newspaper, radio, newsreel, and eyewitness accounts revealed the shocking truth after the concentration camps were liberated.
Many Jews of younger generations grew up in the shadow of those terrible years. Some are the children of camp survivors. Some live with the knowledge that close family members were killed and that their communities died with them. And many others were raised by parents who fought a war against Nazism. For them, the fight against antisemitism was inseparable from the fight against fascism.
We should turn our hearts daily to the dead and dying in Gaza. But trauma, even second-hand trauma, deserves only compassion.
Although I was raised and Bar Mitzvah’d as a Jew, I never experienced this trauma myself. Like many people of my (Baby Boom) generation, I’ve had a few negative experiences but have never been emotionally scarred by antisemitism. And yet, I’ve met people who were. For them, the horrors of the Holocaust still reverberate.
Psychologists use the concept of “multigenerational family processes” to describe the way some emotional responses, including trauma, can be carried from one generation to the next. Biologists have learned that traumatic experiences can epigenetically rewire us in ways that can be passed to children.
Nor is it exclusively an individual experience. Communities, like people, can experience post-traumatic stress. The massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue triggered that in a graphic way. So did the attack of October 7, when we saw endless pictures of wounded and dead Jews.
We don’t believe in ghosts, but some ghosts are real. They linger in our psyches and in our DNA. And sometimes they return.
Weaponizing Trauma
We should turn our hearts daily to the dead and dying in Gaza. But trauma, even second-hand trauma, deserves only compassion.
Western leaders aren’t offering compassion or healing for this trauma. They’re amplifying and weaponizing it by suggesting that peaceful protesters are antisemitic and that student encampments reflect the resurgence of an ancient enmity. These falsehoods have slandered and harmed these idealistic students, many of them Jewish. They have also triggered old wounds.
This country’s political and media elites are—shrewdly, if cruelly—re-traumatizing Jews for the most cynical reason imaginable: to help them aid and abet the unconscionable actions of a foreign country. They seek to terrify the innocent and silence the courageous.
The world’s Jews were made to feel guilt and obligation toward Israel.
Tragically, it’s working. More than half of Jewish students feel threatened by the campus protests, according to recent polling, and many Jews nationwide believe there is a dramatic upsurge in antisemitism. I have talked to some otherwise reasonably well-informed people who actually believe that the peace movement opposes their existence. They’ve made cryptic references to 1930s Germany and repeated false stories of physical attacks on Jewish students.
One even told me that he went to bed every night afraid that someone would murder his children as they slept.
Equating Israeli Force with Jewish Survival
For several generations now, Jews have been told that Israel is the only hope for the safety of the Jewish people. It wasn’t always that way. Hannah Arendt wrote that nationalisms like Zionism were already obsolete by the early 20th century and that Zionism itself was likely to become a “living ghost amid the ruins of our times.” It took a concerted campaign of fear to convince millions of Jews otherwise in the years after World War II.
After the Holocaust, the idea of turning British Palestine into a Eurocentric outpost of Western interests gained momentum. Palestine was framed as a kind of geographic amends to the Jewish people for what they had suffered, not just under the Nazis, but through centuries of European oppression.
Europe’s debt was paid, however, not by the guilty but by the innocent. As Israeli historian Amos Elon wrote, “The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.”
Zionism had never been a majority movement among the world’s Jews, nor was it a priority for Diaspora Jews in the United States. It took some persuasion to bring the American Jewish community around, but the campaign was well-planned and executed. As Arendt writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem,
The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how Judaism, “4,000 years old, with its spiritual creations and its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations,” had always faced “a hostile world,” how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back...
The world’s Jews were made to feel guilt and obligation toward Israel. They were instilled with a deep, collective, existential fear—a fear that was triggered whenever anyone questioned its status as a Jewish ethnostate.
The Killing Must Stop
Jews in the United States do face threats, of course, but not from the left. The Christian right lavishes praise on Israel, even as it nurtures deep wells of antisemitism. The white supremacists who chanted “Jews will not replace us” were not from the left. There is nothing to fear from the pro-Palestine movement. To put it bluntly, many moderate and liberal Jews are being played.
The killing must stop, and a new reality must be built in Palestine. But that can’t happen until Western leaders stop exploiting the genocide of yesterday so they can commit another genocide today.
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