The unexpected triumph of António Costa’s Socialist party in Portugal’s elections this week continues a cautious comeback by Europe’s centre-left – and, analysts say, may hold some lessons in what remains a mixed picture for the continent’s social democrats.
After wins last autumn by Germany’s SPD and Norway’s Labour party, the Portuguese prime minister’s unexpected victory – with 41.7% of the vote, five points up on 2019 – was further good news for a movement that five years ago looked in terminal decline.
In some countries, it still does. The French Socialist party was all but obliterated in the 2017 elections and polls predict its candidate in this year’s presidential race, Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, will do well to capture more than 3% in the first round, a barely imaginable score for a party once led by François Mitterrand and which, only a decade ago, controlled the Élysée, senate, parliament and most of France’s regions.
The Dutch Labour party (PvdA) likewise collapsed to a record low in 2017, winning less than 6% of the vote and losing almost three-quarters of its MPs, and in parliamentary elections last year it failed dismally to improve on its score.
And while the context in central and eastern Europe is different, the Czech Social Democrats (CSSD), who had won four of the six polls held since the country’s formation in 1993 and come second twice, lost so heavily in October that they are no longer even in parliament.
Elsewhere, things are rosier: all five Nordic countries are led by centre-left governments; Italy’s Democratic party is a member of its ruling coalition; Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE heads a progressive alliance in Spain; and a social democrat chancellor, Olaf Scholz, leads a three-party left-liberal coalition in Germany.
Political scientists point to multiple reasons for the decline of Europe’s centre-left over the past decade, and explanations for its cautious recent revival appear just as varied. “We should be very careful about generalising too much,” said Gérard Grunberg, an emeritus professor of European politics at Sciences Po in Paris.
Social democratic parties with their roots in 19th-century labour movements could for decades count for their core vote on traditional, especially manual, workers – an electorate that has shrunk by as much as 50% in some countries. The 2008 financial crash and its economic fallout added anger over high unemployment and falling living standards to mounting alarm among many of those traditional voters at broader trends – globalisation, automation and immigration.
Far-right parties played on those fears while, at the other end of the political spectrum, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation, anti-establishment far-left parties proved equally attractive to another part of the centre-left voter pool: middle-class, often public sector, teachers, healthcare workers.
The result was that as the mainstream parties of government grew smaller and insurgent parties got bigger, the centre-left found itself fatally squeezed.
In some cases a revival has been almost automatic. “Sometimes it’s just been the pendulum of politics,” said Simon Hix, a comparative politics professor at the European University Institute in Florence. “People had simply had enough of the centre-right.”
After 16 years of conservative-led government in Germany and eight in Norway, that may have been the case, but in Portugal it was not: Costa had been prime minister, at the head of unlikely leftwing alliances, since 2015. Some see his resounding win as at least partly reflecting local factors.
“People argue Portugal still has a rather different occupational and class structure,” said Tarik Abou-Chadi, an associate professor of European politics at Oxford. “The knowledge economy, the people more likely to vote green or progressive left, haven’t quite reached it yet.”
Production workers still make up a disproportionately high share of Portugal’s voters, even by southern European standards, and only about 55% of the country’s workforce have completed at least a secondary school education.
But beyond possible structural factors, analysts see some broader trends – and even lessons – in this cautious social democratic comeback.
Hix argues Europe’s conservative parties have drifted right to compete with the far right, “and that’s made liberal voters uncomfortable”. Public sector workers and young professionals “want grownups to run the country”.
For Abou-Chadi, recent elections “have shown that if the left can coordinate, it can win”. But for social democrats to profit, they need to be “the main challenger on the left. And that’s not currently the case in, for example, France and the Netherlands.”
According to Grunberg, the social democratic parties that have survived as main challengers and are now winning elections (albeit with scores often half what they once were) are those that adapted to the new political landscape.
“Some have cooperated with parties to their right, others to their left,” he said. “There is a social democratic electorate: sharing humanist values, open to some degree of economic liberalism. But social democratic parties’ absolute priority must be to govern. And they need strong leaders.”
Catherine de Vries, a Dutch political scientist at Bocconi University in Milan, put it slightly differently. Where social democrat parties had been successful – in the Nordics, Spain, Germany, Portugal – they had “repurposed”, she said.
Between the third way’s love of economic liberalism and the radical left of the likes of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, she said, there was “a middle ground that says: the state can do things, it can protect, be a social elevator, and we are the party of the state – but we really can run it. We are a true party of government. We can do this.”
A focus on “quite traditional, solid, straightforward social democratic ideas – better housing, improving low pay – but with the competence to deliver” had proved key, she said, but it required a strong, popular leader and the courage to take on “difficult issues like immigration: the culture war stuff”.
All agreed that Costa exemplified that “safe pair of hands”: warm and charismatic but capable of delivering on wages and pensions while still promoting economic growth and maintaining fiscal discipline.
“A voice of clear, steady reason in a changing and uncertain environment,” said de Vries. “That’s what the centre-left needs to be.”
