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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, told Jacobin, “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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Endgame for Syriza? The Unbearable Lightness of the Greek Left
Perhaps those who voted for Kasselakis are unfamiliar with U.S. politics and the true color of the Democratic Party, but it is a vision that undoubtedly sends shivers down the spine of the members of the old guard.
Sep 26, 2023
The Third Way is a political term that gained currency in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is associated with the New Labour administration of Tony Blair, who served as UK’s prime minister from 1997 to 2007, but also with those of Bill Clinton in the US (1993-2001) and Gerhard Schroder in Germany (1998-2005), respectively. The term itself was developed by British sociologist Anthony Giddens and denotes a distinct political ideology that argues in favor of so-called “centrist” politics.
Essentially, Third Way proposals seek to reconcile right-wing and left-wing policies. More specifically, the “Third Way” aims to integrate center-right economic policies and center-left social policies. As such, the “Third Way” is really nothing short of a political stratagem whose underlying goal is to maintain the hegemony of capitalism by making the system sensitive to cultural and social sensibilities. Disregarding the left flank, embracing the “catch-all” thesis, and loosening the influence of labor in the economy and society at large while promoting at the same time the politics of multiculturalism define the politics and strategy of social-democratic parties that became part of the "Third Way" movement.
Make no mistake, Syriza is entering a new era with Kasselakis in charge of the party.
Indeed, by the late 1990s, virtually all the social-democratic parties in advanced capitalist societies had fallen prey to the fatal attraction of the Third Way mentality while the traditional values and beliefs of the old Left joined the dustbin of history. The only country in the western world with a radical leftwing party that did not fight for power on the ground laid by the Third Way was Greece.
Until very recently, that is.
Part of the explanation for the “delay” of Greek leftwing parties in adopting the approach of the "Third Way" is that social democracy was never established in Greece. Throughout the 20th century, the bulk of the country’s left had aligned with a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, named KKE, but a major split occurred in 1968 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. A big group broke from the KKE, forming KKE Interior, which eventually came to identify itself with Eurocommunism, a political movement that flourished in the late 1970s in several western European communist parties and sought to introduce socialism beyond the political and ideological orbit of Soviet communism.
The Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) traces its roots to the KKE Interior, although Eurocommunism disappeared as an international current shortly after its birth and, for all practical intents and purposes, the Syriza party that rose to power in Greece in 2015 was a political organization that had no discernible ideological traits whatsoever other than an expressed aversion to the fiscal austerity measures that had been imposed on the country by its international creditors -- namely, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – as a condition to the bailout deals that had been crafted in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
However, while in power, Syriza experienced a huge metamorphosis. The dilemma of choosing between resistance and capitulation was resolved in favor of the latter. Syriza had promised voters it would ditch austerity and in fact rip to pieces the bailout memorandum. In turn, it not only continued to enforce the same austerity program that had been implemented by the previous Greek governments but ended up signing a third bailout memorandum.
Moreover, even before coming to power, Syriza had initiated a series of moves that aimed to reshape the party’s political profile in congruence with the trends observed in those western social democratic parties that had adopted the "Third Way" proposals. The process of Syriza’s transformation into a mainstream party continued unabated both when the “left” was in power (from 2015-2019) and back in opposition (2019-2023). Yet, while it was abundantly clear that the party, under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras and his inner team, was bent on abandoning its tradition of radical politics and that a prominent left faction inside Syriza was too weak to halt that process, it wasn’t at all clear where the party’s base stood.
The answer to that mystery was revealed during the leadership election that was held just this past Sunday when party members elected a gay, liberal, former Goldman Sachs trader, shipping investor, and political neophyte Stefanos Kasselakis to head the once radical left-wing Syriza party.
Tsipras had stepped down as Syriza chief following his party’s humiliating defeat in the June 2023 general elections. Given the party’s dwindling public support, Tsipras’ resignation was inevitable, but the question why Syriza members (though it should be said that some 40,000 were registered as members on the spot) decided to place the future of the party into the hands of someone who was light on policy and heavy on social media marketing during his campaign speaks volumes about the political processes that had been unleashed by Tsipras and his inner circle over the past 9 years or so.
Kasselakis, with no experience in politics and no leftist credentials, but with the blessing of Tsipras himself and his closest associates, beat former Minister of Labor Effi Achtsioglou in a runoff election, sending shockwaves throughout the Greek left.
The ideal scenario for Syriza’s future that its new leader has envisioned is that it becomes the mirror image of the Democratic Party in the United States. Perhaps those who voted for Kasselakis are unfamiliar with U.S. politics and the true color of the Democratic Party, but it is a vision that undoubtedly sends shivers down the spine of the members of the old guard inside Syriza for they surely know that this is a recipe for the complete disappearance of the Left from the Greek political scene.
Most likely, then, what lies ahead for the party are divisions and conflict, rather than unity and peace. Eventually, an actual, formal split of the Syriza party also cannot be ruled out. Indeed, senior Syriza cadre and former education minister Nikos Filis said in a TV interview the other day that Kasselakis is “a cross between Beppe Grillo [an Italian comedian and co-founder of Italy’s Five Star Movement political party] and Trump.” In the same interview, Filis also blamed Tsipras for Syriza’s demise. And Effie Achtsioglou has already turned down every party post offered to her by Syriza’s new leader.
Make no mistake, Syriza is entering a new era with Kasselakis in charge of the party. Under Tsipras, Syriza abandoned any pretext of being a radical leftwing party. Under Kasselakis, Syriza will cease having affinity to leftist politics in any form or shape, which means that Greece will now be left with a Leninist-Stalinist Communist Party as the only large-scale organized political force fighting for the interest of the working class.
Oh, the unbearable lightness of the Greek left.
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The Rise and Fall of Greece’s Radical-in-Name-Only Syriza Party
Lack of experience in governance, ideological confusion, severe structural constraints, crude political opportunism, and broken promises guaranteed that Syriza’s downfall was just a matter of time.
May 25, 2023
On January 25, 2015, Greece’s left-wing party Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), which subscribed to no particular ideology but ran an election campaign that vowed to end the sadistic austerity measures that had been imposed on Greece by its international creditors, shred the bailout agreements into pieces, write off a big chuck of the debt, and create jobs for hundreds of thousands of unemployed, won the legislative elections by taking 36% of the popular vote. The result of the election sent shock waves through Europe’s political establishment and marked the return of hope for Greece and left-wing parties and movements around the world.
It was indeed a historic victory for the Left, especially considering the fact that, ten years earlier, Syriza was struggling to gain just a few seats in the Greek parliament. The Communist Party of Greece was far more popular than the Coalition of the Radical Left, whose ranks included an array of leftists ranging from Trotskyists, Maoists, and neo-Marxists to greens and feminists. Indeed, while the Communist party had solid links with working-class people and exerted decisive influence on trade union activism, Syriza’s “impact on civil society was confined to the ideological attraction that it had for a small segment of the academia."
On May 21, 2023, elections were held in Greece and the conservative New Democracy party of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis scored a landslide victory, trouncing Syriza by 20 percentage points. However, the new electoral system of proportional representation that had been introduced under the former prime minister and Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras prevents New Democracy’s 40% vote to win an outright majority of the 300 seats in parliament. Mitsotakis had revealed all along that he is not interested in sharing power, so a second election is going to take place in late June where the winning party needs to achieve just 37% of the popular vote.
It was abundantly clear to any unbiased observer that Syriza’s inner circle consisted of people who were dedicated to the pursuit and maintenance of power rather than bringing about radical change.
The scale of Syriza’s defeat in the parliamentary elections of May 21 (lost all but one of the 59 electoral regions in Greece) may signify the end of the road for the party of Alexis Tsipras. The party’s demise has in fact been underway from the very first weeks that Tsipras took office as Greece’s prime minister. Lack of experience in governance, ideological confusion, severe structural constraints, but also crude political opportunism and broken promises pretty much guaranteed that Syriza’s downfall was just a matter of time.
First, the radical-in-name-only Syriza party formed a government with the right-wing and xenophobic party Independent Greeks. There were deep disparities of all sorts between the two parties, but obviously this did not matter to Tsipras since he saw forging an alliance with right-wingers as a necessary tactical move to secure power. And power was all that ever mattered to Syriza’s leader and his inner circle. During the 2023 election campaign, Tsipras would leave many leftist voters flabbergasted by courting voters from the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.
Second, Tsipras signed an agreement to extend the austerity measures imposed on Greece by the euro masters, only a few weeks after coming to power.
Third, Syriza’s leader gambled on Greece’s future with a sham referendum in order to save his government from collapse and then went on to betray an entire nation that voted overwhelmingly against the continuation of austerity by signing a new bailout agreement that continued Greece’s status as Germany’s “de facto colony.”
Tsipras called the new bailout agreement “a necessary choice,” though he had engaged in ferocious attacks against his predecessors for having signed similar bailout agreements with the international creditors.
More than 40 Syriza MP’s spoke against the new measures, and half of Syriza’s central committee sided against the new agreement. But none of this mattered. Syriza had very weak democratic structures, no real links with the Greek working-class, and Tsipras had total authority over party decisions as most policy issues were decided in unofficial meetings with people close to the “great leader.” Moreover, Syriza as a party had lost its autonomy once it gained power and “was subsumed into the state.”
Indeed, it was abundantly clear to any unbiased observer that Syriza’s inner circle consisted of people who were dedicated to the pursuit and maintenance of power rather than bringing about radical change. Subsequently, following his government’s capitulation to the euro masters, Tsipras took steps to rebrand the party as a “progressive” political force and begun to tap into the legacy of the Pasok party, one of Greece’s center-left political parties, and to emulate more and more the political persona and political tactics of its charismatic founder and former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, who, incidentally, also appeared on the Greek political scene as a radical who made exorbitant promises to the people, such as socializing the economy, modernizing the countryside, terminating membership in NATO, and shutting down U.S. military bases in Greece.
Since the end of the Second World War, sadly enough, the Greek left has been betrayed by its own leaders on multiple occasions. The end result of Syriza’s abandonment of radicalism was defection on the part of hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class voters, though its metamorphosis into a mainstream political party attracted many center-left voters to its ranks.
In the 2019 legislative elections, Syriza still managed to gather 31.5% of the popular vote, losing just less than four points since its last victory in 2015, but the conservative New Democracy party not only won and secured a comfortable majority of 158 out of 300 seats, but had a remarkable 11-point increase from 2015.
Moreover, unlike Tsipras’ “leftist” government, Mitsotakis' conservative government kept many of its campaign promises and handled some foreign policy crises rather effectively. For example, Mitsotakis kept his promise to cut taxes, including a 22% cut to an unpopular property tax introduced during the first bailout agreement, suspended the value added tax on new construction, and reduced the insurance costs of employees and businesses.
Big capital and the middles classes have been the main beneficiaries of Mitsotakis’ efforts to rejuvenate the Greek economy. Because of the pandemic, Greece’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 9% in 2020, but grew by 8.43% in 2021 and by 5.91% in 2022. Tourism contributed greatly to the strong rebound in GDP, and the economic prosperity of Greece remains strongly tied to the development of tourism.
However, Greece’s current accounts deficit increased substantially in 2022, mainly due to the worsening of the balance of goods. And the government debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 171.3% at the end of 2022, which is really at unsustainable levels, though the mainstream press in Greece would not devote space to presenting gloomy economic data ahead of the elections.
But it’s doubtful that doing so would have made any difference. The truth of the matter is that there is an impression among many Greek voters that the Mitsotakis’ government has stabilized the economy, protects the national interest more than adequately, and that it would be suicidal to have Syriza back in power after all its broken promises and flimsy statements made about the economy by key party members during an election campaign, which included a proposal for “local complementary currencies” by the party’s former minister of finance and which came only a few days after Yanis Varoufakis (rightly or wrongly, one of the most unpopular political figures in all of Greece) had called for the adoption of a parallel currency “Dimitra.” Syriza’s shaky position on key issues of national security was also a major drawback for many voters.
Indeed, it seems that what lies at the heart of the 2023 Greek legislative election results is that many voters were distrustful of Tsipras and his politics. This is most likely why so many voters appeared unfazed by revelations of a major surveillance scandal that engulfed the conservative prime minister himself. Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government is made up of right-wing conservatives and even includes in its ranks a couple of high-ranking officials with a history of involvement in far-right politics, but it seems that voters were more concerned with Syriza’s own deficiencies rather than those of the ruling conservative party.
Voters also delivered “a crushing defeat” to Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 party as it failed to cross the 3% threshold to re-enter parliament.
Among left-wing parties, only the Greek Communist party performed better, gathering 7.23% of the popular vote over 5.3% in 2019.
In sum, the future of the left in Greece looks anything but promising at present. With the revival of Pasok, which had been in steep decline electorally since 2012 but managed to get 11.46% of the popular vote in the 2023 legislative elections, Syriza’s long demise may be complete a few years from now. And it will be very difficult for the current Communist party to climb into double digits even if Syriza returns to the dark days of securing low-to-mid single digit votes.
But the Greek left has suffered many crippling blows in the past and always finds a way to resurrect itself, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Because as long as exploitation, injustice, and extreme inequality remain central aspects of human society, there will always be a need to create a radical vision for the future.
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