Hardly anybody now remembers the Hungarian Socialdemocratic Party (MSzDP). It has been effectively swallowed up by the Socialist Party, which isn’t exactly setting the world on fire electorally. The latest tests of opinion have come in Slovakia and Ireland. In Ireland the PES member Labour Party won only six seats out of 160. The story of that election was a surge by the (supposedly) radical left adherents Sinn Fein. In Slovakia, the Social Democrats dropped by 10% to 18%, thus ending its second (so called red-brown) coalition with nationalists.
These results again raise the question we have been asking this past decade – can progressive-left/centre-left/socialdemocratic parties perform well electorally? Or are they destined to follow the MSzDP into oblivion?
Let us consider how PES parties have fared in national elections in the EU and UK. In France the PS candidate came fifth in the 2017 presidential election first round (with 6.4%), behind a radical left anti-European candidate in fourth. In the subsequent legislative elections the PS plus allies went from 40% to just under 10% of the vote.
In Belgium the two parties for Flanders and Wallonia together got 16% of the vote and 29 out of 150 seats. The notable result of the 2019 election is that parties advocating separatism for Flanders got almost 50% of the vote in Flanders. In the Netherlands, of course, the 2017 election saw a complete collapse of support for PvdA down to under 6% of the vote. The Luxembourg LSAP came third with 17.6% of votes.
In Germany in 2017 the SPD achieved its worst result since WW2 with only 21% of the vote. In Italy the centre-left coalition won 23% and came third. In the UK the Labour Party also suffered its worst result since the war (in terms of seats).
In Austria, the 2017 saw the SPOe gain by 0.1% to 26.9%, just holding on by one more seat above the far right FPOe. The SPOe had dropped its 30 year ban on a coalition with the FPOe. Another significant aspect of this election was the split in the Greens which saw the official party lose all its seats by not making the 4% cut. In Slovenia the Social Democrats came third with 10% of the vote. In Croatia in 2015, the centre-left coalition came second with 32% of the vote.
The Czech Republic last held parliamentary elections in 2018 where the Socialdemocrats dropped to sixth place on 7%. Hungary has an election system that rewards the largest party and in 2018 Fidesz gained over two thirds of the seats, with the PES member MSzP gaining just 12% of votes and coming third with 20 out of 199 seats. In Poland the Law and Justice Party is similar to Fidesz and also dominates – in the election of 2019 the coalition led by the socialdemocratic SLD got 12.5% of the vote and came third with 49 out of 460 seats.
The Bulgarian Socialist Party gained 27.2% of the vote and one third of the seats, coming second.
In Estonia the Social Democratic Party dropped to 9.8% of the votes and went from third to fifth. In Latvia the socialdemocratic party Harmony topped the poll in 2018, but with only 19.8% of the poll. After the elections the centre right leaders stated that they would form any government they could excluding Harmony, even if it meant a coalition with six different parties! In Lithuania the Social Democratic Party went from being the largest party to third, losing over half their seats with 15% of the vote.
In Cyprus the centre-left EDEK came fourth with 6.2% of the vote, but there the radical left AKEL polled 25.7% in second place.
In Greece it is hard to say which party represents the progressive left. Movement for change includes PES member PASOK (and came third with 8.1%). MeRA25 is also a progressive left party and part of DiEM25, which got 3.4% of the vote (sixth) and 9 seats. The main opposition party now is SYRIZA which is probably best described as radical left.
There have been some successes. In Romania the PSD got 45.5% of the vote making it easily the largest party. Malta is another exception, with the Labour Party gaining 55% of the vote at the last election.
In Finland the Social Democratic Party came top with 17.7% of the vote, but had to form a broad based coalition. Although the Socialdemocrats remain in charge of a minority coalition in Sweden, they had their lowest share of the vote, at 28.3%, since 1911. Denmark’s Socialdemocracy came top with 25.9% of the vote and was able to form a coalition with the other ‘red bloc’ parties.
In Spain, the PSOE came top with 28% of the vote. Portugal’s progressive left party the PS came top with 36.4% and has had more success than most in forming a left coalition government and implementing post-austerity policies.
The performance of the S&D parties in the European Parliament election of 2019 is complicated by the subsequent UK withdrawal, but essentially the number of seats held by the group went down from just under 25% to fewer than 20%, despite some local encouraging recoveries eg in the Netherlands.
So progressive left parties have been able to join coalition governments in some countries, but rarely are they able to determine the direction of policy. It could be argued that being in a junior position with centre right parties is one of the factors that reduces their votes in subsequent elections. However, the years since the global financial crisis have certainly not seen a resurgence of the progressive left, as some of us anticipated.
How we can increase our share of the vote, and more importantly why we want to and what we should do with better representation will be the subject of future articles here.
Peter Smith
May 2020