Social Democracy's Lost Spark: When the Third Way Led Nowhere

The centre-left's millennial triumph marked not a new dawn but the beginning of a long decline into cautious centrism.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/social-democracys-lost-spark-when-the-third-way-led-nowhere



A dull ache permeates Europe’s social democrats as they look back to former glory days, full of regrets and recriminations, whilst looking ahead in alarm. Yet bright sparks do illuminate their glum landscape. The Dutch centre-left of Rob Jetten’s D66 has seen off the far right of Geert Wilders. Despite a long coalition-building process, the Netherlands’ democratic battle has been won against the fascist-flavoured xenophobic parties threatening the continent.

At first sight, the progressive cause is not doing as badly as glum social democrats often feel. Their parties lead governments or in polls in Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. In Germany, the centre-right held off the far right. In the UK, Labour won a resounding victory last year—a rarity for a party out of power for over two-thirds of the post-war years. But social democrats face the bitter fact that the days when they regularly scored over 40 per cent have passed in a fragmenting political landscape.

My own best memory of the glory days was captured in the splendid Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in November 1999 at a conference of progressive leaders, celebrating their combined high-water mark. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Lionel Jospin, Massimo D’Alema, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Romano Prodi assembled to present to the world a future of progressive optimism—a vanquishing vision for the new century to come.

In that bitterly cold but stunningly beautiful hall, some 500 of us gazed at the Vasari paintings, uplifted as ever by Clinton’s grand, sweeping speechmaking. Surprisingly, his was the most left-wing contribution, as UK Europe minister Denis MacShane recalled in his diaries: “There are people and places that are completely left behind in the United States,” Clinton said, speaking of the plight of poverty at home and bringing justice to the developing world by lifting their debts—a great social democratic vision. But it was an esprit d’escalier, a thought on the way out, arriving far too late with only a year left in office before handing over not to another progressive, but to the rightist George W. Bush. As ever, Clinton’s flights of rhetoric touched the heart but not the substance of his policies. So often leaders turn more radical once it’s all over.

snip