The crushing defeat last week of the Spanish Socialists is yet another nail in the coffin for overreaching, overspending government in Europe. The continent over, socialist and social democrat governments are being wiped out for a more fiscally sound alternative.
These crushing electoral defeats are not about an anti-incumbency feeling, as some comrades have tried to claim, but a rejection of an economic philosophy that has brought Europe to its knees. The electorate the continent over have finally had enough of governments spending too much, and propping up excessive and unsustainable public sectors.
As said, the final hauling down of the red flag occurred the other week in Spain, when the socialist party was removed for the centre right Popular Party, against a backdrop of spiralling debt. Just days before, Greece's socialist President George Papandreou finally walked the political plank, with both the Greek and European economy almost on its knees. He had not stopped the trend that had allowed almost half the country to become employed by the state.
Of course, this is not a phenomenon unique to mainland Europe. Here in Britain we shed the Labour Party after an election campaign dominated by the economic chaos they had wrought, and their inability to take responsibility for fixing it. Next door in Ireland, even the more centrist Fianna Fail couldn't survive, having suffered the most crushing defeat in their history at the hands of the centre-right Fianna Gael.
It seems when the going gets tough, people vote for the right. Indeed the only centre-right politician to fall under the eurozone debt crisis bus was Silvio Berlusconi, and even then his country would rather unelected technocrats run them than socialists!
The European left can ignore the electoral evidence if they want, but the fact remains almost no socialist or social democratic governments remain in Europe. The economic crisis in both the eurozone and the UK has shown that governments with a huge public spending agenda eventually max out the credit card, and nobody likes waking up to find a red letter waiting for them.
The difficult readjustment we are all going through is a direct result of profligate governments, and people know and will remember that. We may not like the inevitable difficulty that austerity decisions cause, but that pain is like holding something hot as a child, it burns your hand once and you remember what caused it, and never grab it again. The loss of trust for socialist and social democratic parties caused could, and should, last a generation or more.
Comments
Clr Ralph Baldwin / November 25 2011 9:44pm
Well its no accident Social democracy is somewhere between the political Rim and U-bend.
Let's just stop for a second and try and remember for example the point and arguments made for Social democracy at the European level, this is key because it also highlights the greatest political failure embarked on by a political group since the collapse of the Soviet block.
The modern arguments at the time were that we needed more potent Government to balance out and keep a check on the massive Corporations and that to tackle major issues such as International Crime, the Environment, Economic Freedoms and collective political and social assistance in times of emergence both in and out of the Euro-zone to deal with issues.
Those were the arguments. What did the public across Europe get then?
The rise of a bunch of unelites, they achieved very little on the environment beyond placing tariffs (we can argue how strictly countries have adhered to this), watched by helplessly as fishing quotas resulted in massive waste as dead fish were dumped back at sea, Corporate DE-regulation due to ultimately, political corruption as the elites did not stand up to the Corporations but sold out completely to them and decided the best way to be better than the rest of us was by being weaker, less moral and incompetent, using plain ignorance of normative economics and the real economies around them to justify a sense of aristocratic pretension, but in the eyes of the public whose expectations were based upon the idea of pro-democratic, more pragmatic and down to earth politics relevant to the real world, they just looked what they really were and are, incredulous fraudsters lacking in intelligence and supremely incompetent.
Clr Ralph Baldwin / November 25 2011 9:45pm
The lost all credibility, the less democratic they became the more they seemed worse than the Right, why worse if they are merely just as bad? Well its a case of better the devil you know. A Tory is exactly what it says he or she is on the tin, the extra deception of promising morality and delivering excrement is less pleasant to the eyes of the electorate across Europe and the overall effect and impact was to weaken democracy and democratic choice overall.
The economics of all this merely follows on from the democratic crises like a shadow.
We do not trust any of them, but we trust social democrats less because they failed, they failed to empower people democratically and this is important because this is how we address wealth and its distribution to create a fairer system, it just doesn't happen via the State alone and the whim of a single politician no matter how worthy.
We are talking about changing society itself to make it more equitable to the vast majority and the old Socialist arguments focused purely on wealth distribution without regard to a viable way in which to do so, hampered by the State solves all things and the oldest bugbear of the all, corruption. A corrupt social democrat is far worse than a corrupt Tory because of what we expect from each of them but neither is good news.
We have also lacked moral leadership and far too many politicians have simply taken up positions to satisfy their egos with no real ideas as why they are there and what they are doing there, seduced by the money. Parties have lacked the ability to create a workable ideology that places responsibility upon their elected reps and teach them the discipline required to serve their electorates.
Clr Ralph Baldwin / November 25 2011 9:46pm
So we have a political vacuum at a very dangerous time indeed.
Elite?
Two years ago i would have been swiftly condemned for writing this, today it's a solid fact. Incompetence. They are not elite they have failed and are failing daily of the highest order at the Leaderships of Social Democratic parties especially the delusions of elitism and superiority where no credible ability has manifested reigns supreme.
Sitting on their bottoms waiting for someone else to tell them how to win elections as they lost their Governments, sitting on their bottoms now having no ideas or creativity or skill to address the modern problems we face.
Totally useless but committed to one thing and one thing only, keeping their positions no matter what happens and no matter the consequences. Whilst fairer minded members of the public await progressive solutions at a difficult time where the Right have perversely found themselves having to attempt to clean up a mess they would normally be expected to cause.
Because the Center Left has failed, it failed because it was unable to retain the focus on the people and the focus on democracy.
Clr Ralph Baldwin / November 28 2011 12:40pm
This article has implications with one written on Progress: http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2011/11/26/challenging-hate-across-europe/
Who believes it matters? A poll actually worth reading about what people feel and think about Labour , which actually has very dangerous implications should the economy take a fall, probably totally glazed over by shallow politicians but of deep concern to me.
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/
Sheer lack of choice and powerlessness economically when so many got it wrong at the top is unlike anything that has occurred in the UK. The reason for this is a sense of National identity and sense that politicians are public servants is gone.
The trust vacuum is poignant and this is why for past two years i have been very vocal and less than polite with politicians who needed a kick up the backside because they are and remain very stupid people, with one or two exceptions.
Challenging hate across Europe is going to be very hard when we cannot defeat the conceit and contempt that nutters hold for the people under the fantastical delusion that in opposition to modern life and science regarding nature/nurture of elitism and political elites.
Something for you all to think about, had Labour lived up to its historical record and some of its good traditions and values we would now be in a better place because we would have more creative and less "controlled and repressed" politicians.
Labour is completely to blame for this and the legacy of Labour in helping the far right will be recorded in history along with the people responsible when they bleated about Equality and fairness but deilver the opposite, failing many people and as I argued on Total Politics this has resulted in the destruction of Social Democracy quite rightly across Europe.
Elitism and the egos of the very weak who need to compensate so badly by using such pathetic empty titles.
Foxley / March 06 2012 11:11pm
The analysis in this article is shockingly ignorant. Where to start with it? Firstly, the Socialists lost power in Spain after having pursued the same strict austerity programme that Cameron and most right-wing politicos are pursuing. Austerity cost them the election, not "overspending".
Secondly, both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael (not Fianna Gael) are hard to place politically - it's very dodgy to say that one is centre-right and one is centre-left. But it's telling that the new Irish government is a coalition between Fine Gael and the stridently socialist Irish Labour Party.
The fall of Papendreou is cited as evidence of people "voting for the right" even though there hasn't actually been an election yet and it was his own party that removed him. Meanwhile, the author paints the fall of Berlusconi as showing the rise of a technocrat in preference to socialists - but in that case, what happened in Greece was the rise of a technocrat in preference to conservatives.
Meanwhile, where are these governments with a "huge public spending agenda" which caused the current "readjustment" with some sort of "profligate government". Labour in the UK is implied to be one, but it stuck to the Conservative Party's spending plans for the first 6 of its 13 years in government, and after that only grew public spending very moderately. The explosion in public spending came in 2008, when the government decided (rightly or wrongly) to bail-out the banks. The same is true across Europe - parties of the left for the past 20 years were characterised by the Third Way, pursuing neo-liberal policies that warmed Thatcher's cockles.
Is it a "fact" that "almost no socialist or social democratic governments remain in Europe"? No. Portugal, Belgium and Denmark all elected socialist Prime Ministers last year, the socialists lead the grand-coalition government in Austria (and won the presidency in 2010) and are also in coalition governments in Finland and Ireland. Sarkozy will be very lucky if he holds on to power later this year, and Angela Merkel stands a good chance of being ousted next year if the German social democrats pick the right candidate.