Europe’s lurch to the right rolls on. Only unity on the left can stop it
The Guardian
Recent polls in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Finland tell the story of voters swayed by fear and prejudice. Progressive parties – take note Keir Starmer – need a clear, principled agenda to turn that tide.
Why does the left keep losing? It’s not a question liberals and progressives particularly want to confront, but look around. Reactionary parties of the political right and far right are once more on the rise and on the march across Europe, as shown again by last week’s lopsided election results in Spain and Italy.
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Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has called a snap general election in July after crushing polls setbacks in the country’s regions and cities last weekend. Photograph: Dumitru Doru/EPA.
Each country is different, its circumstances unique. Yet a broad pattern is discernible – and it’s not difficult to trace. The banal common denominator is that parties of the European left, hard and soft, are too fractured and fractious to build winning coalitions that offer convincing alternative solutions to voters’ problems. (...)
It’s not as though rightwing conservatives, populists, nationalists and assorted radicals and extremists have all the answers. Anything but! (...)
How may this Europe-wide tendency be reversed? Maybe resurrection for the left will be found in the example of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister and Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) leader. (...)
In trying to rally the left, Sánchez seeks to expose his opponents’ divisiveness and hate-mongering. An alternative approach to neutralising the right is to absorb it – as attempted last month by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the Turkish opposition’s presidential candidate. (...)
The radical right’s resilience should ring alarm bells in Britain, too, which, despite itself, is not immune to European trends. By shifting rightwards in hopes of winning power in 2024, Starmer’s Labour risks empowering its opponents. Better to draw a line like Sánchez, Spain’s socialist leader, then set one’s own agenda, offer a clear choice and trust voters to decide. It’s not that complicated. Unity, plus well-defined, principled policy programmes, is the way the left stops losing – and learns to win again.
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