Battered by the populist right, progressives lack a vision for the future
Like many debates on the left, this one took place inside a bubble. Amsterdam is a multicultural city of cycling lanes and tolerant drug policies, run by a coalition of liberal and left-wing parties . But in the rest of the Netherlands, politics has been transformed by anti-immigrant populism. In provincial elections on March 15th, populist parties on the right combined for more than a third of the national vote.
Indeed, the left looked healthy as recently as 2021, when it governed all four Nordic countries as well as Portugal and Spain. At the end of that year Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats took power in Germany in coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats. But the moment proved fleeting. In France’s elections in 2022 the centre-left Socialists were all but wiped out. Hard-right parties now hold or share power in Italy and Sweden, and in Finland are in coalition negotiations.
Italy’s Democratic Party seems to be imitating the French turn to the left. In February it elected a young left-wing leader, Elly Schlein, who takes progressive stances on gay rights and immigration. She is seen as a breath of fresh air, and theis doing better in polls. But Italy’s left, too, is split: many left-leaning voters back the unpredictable, populist Five Star Movement.
If not environmentalism, then what? Ideas about intersectional social justice that enthuse progressive Americans are less popular in Europe. They evoke thorny problems of integration, which since the migrant crisis of 2015-16 have been seen as vote losers. Some look to Denmark’s governing Social Democrats as a model. They have turned to punitive anti-immigrant policies. But studies show that imitating the right’s harshness towards immigrants does not win back voters for the left.
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