Following Syriza’s election victory in Greece in January, and strong polling ratings for Podemos in Spain, are radical left parties becoming a stronger force in European politics? Luke March writes on the electoral performance of the radical left since the financial crisis. He notes that while a Syriza-style ‘surge’ remains unlikely for most radical left parties, there is fertile ground for their policies, with a significant percentage of voters in European countries self-identifying with left-wing political ideologies

March, Luke

LSE Research Online

24/03/2015Beyond Syriza and Podemos, other radical left parties arethreatening to break into the mainstream of European politicsblogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2015/03/24/beyond-syriza-and-podemos-other-radical-left-parties-are-threatening-to-break-into-the-mainstream-of-european-politics/Following Syriza’s election victory in Greece in January, and strong polling ratings for Podemos inSpain, are radical left parties becoming a stronger force in European politics? Luke March writeson the electoral performance of the radical left since the ﬁnancial crisis. He notes that while aSyriza-style ‘surge’ remains unlikely for most radical left parties, there is fertile ground for theirpolicies, with a signiﬁcant percentage of voters in European countries self-identifying with left-wingpolitical ideologies.For years now, several analysts (including me) have been proclaiming that the radical left is on theupswing in European party systems. However, reality has often confounded the prognosis, with electoral dividendsfrom the Great Recession meagre, and every success counteracted by an apparent debacle. Certainly, politically, itis the right and austerity programmes that have dominated the crisis response, leading to the suspicion that theradical left had passed up a perfect opportunity to exploit capitalism’s travails.Until now. Syriza’s stunning victory in the Greek legislative elections elected the ﬁrst anti-austerity radical leftgovernment within the EU, at a time when the austerity consensus is under sustained assault from many angles.This has led to a profusion of sympathetic articles proclaiming that Syriza ‘magic equation’ will usher in a seachange in European politics, with a wave of hope and solidarity transforming Europe and ﬁnally undermining TINA(Thatcher’s adage that ‘There is No Alternative’ to neo-liberal transformation). Of course, TINA has been proclaimeddead before (particularly after the 1999 Seattle protests), and if simply asserting austerity’s demise (howeverforcefully) were enough to transform Europe, the left would have done so long ago.A closer focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the European radical left shows that Syriza remains exceptionaland its success is unlikely to be repeated imminently anywhere else, even if activists draw speciﬁc lessons as wellas inspiration. Similarly, dramatic ruptures in European politics remain remote possibilities. Nevertheless, the longer-term prospects for the radical left will continue to improve, especially if Syriza’s governing experience oﬀers beneﬁtsboth to the Greek population and the wider European left alike.The mosaic left – from movement to mutationToday’s European radical left is a ‘mosaic left’ – a constellation of variegated parties and movements from motleybackgrounds. There have been concerted eﬀorts to develop common policies and networks, and still moreimportantly to bridge chasms between diﬀerent ideological traditions, both in forming new electorally-focused partieswhich are coalitions of diﬀerent tendencies and in emphasising as never before European nuclei of common action(e.g. the European Social Forums, the GUE/NGL European parliamentary group and the European Left Party). Thisradical left is no longer in crisis and decline, as it was until the 2000s, and the emphasis has shifted from (eternal)fragmentation to limited fusion. There has even been a signiﬁcant uptick in party performance from the mid-2000swith parties increasing their vote share by over 50 per cent on average since the onset of the Great Recession, asshown in Table 1.Table 1. European radical left parties’ national electoral performance (September 2008-January 2014)1/7Note: Parties marked with * were in coalition. Calculations from www.parties-and-elections.eu. Parliamentary parties only. Note that the Latvian Socialist Party did not competein the 2014 elections.2/7Nevertheless, aggregate growth can’t conceal inconsistency. A ten per cent average vote share is not negligible, butit is much less impressive when Syriza, Harmony Centre (a coalition between the larger Social Democrats and theLatvian Socialist Party which the latter has now left) and the former Soviet bloc (where historical legacy helpsincrease party support) are excluded. The radical left tends to do better in poorer and/or smaller countries, and isregularly dwarfed by the radical right in some of the more prosperous/larger countries (e.g. France, Italy and theUK).Iceland excepted, the Nordic countries are no longer a zone of particular strength. The performance of the radicalleft in the 2014 European elections is similarly patchwork. On one hand, the GUE/NGL group was one of thewinners of the elections, increasing its seat share from 4.8 per cent to 6.9 per cent and, with 52 seats, becoming thebiggest radical left group in the EP since 1986, broadening its membership to 14 countries, far beyond the Latincommunist core of the 1980s and early 1990s. On the other hand, in the 1980s it had nearly 10 per cent of the EP’stotal seats. Moreover, its total is disproportionately boosted by stellar results in Greece and Spain (17 MEPs). Itscurrent diverse makeup includes parochial, regionalist and nationalist members unlikely to help build a true radicalleft family, which hardly implies that the group will overcome its record as one of the EP’s least cohesive groups.More troublingly, the radical left no longer exists as a movement in the pre-1989 sense, with (albeit in few Europeancountries) strongly institutionalised parties embedded in subcultures with a panoply of aﬃliated social organisations.This is why some from the Marxist-Leninist tradition regard the radical left as still in deep crisis, summarilydismissing the achievements of what they regard as electoralist, ‘left reformist’ and even ‘centrist’ parties with weaksocial bases incapable of exploiting class discontent.However, the fact remains that for much of the last two decades, genuine protest movements, even when motivatedby social justice sentiment, have largely bypassed organised political parties, even those of the radical left, and even(still infused by the spirit of ‘68) have seen them as ossiﬁed institutions of the ‘system’ rather than as part of thesolution. Even mass demonstrations in which trade unions and parties of the left have played key roles have oftenfailed to bear obvious electoral dividends (e.g. the anti-austerity general strikes in Portugal in 2012-3 led to marginalgrowth for the Socialist Party and Communist Party, and a collapse in the Left Bloc vote in the 2014 Euro elections).Growing exceptions to this rule are younger radical left groups among protests in Eastern Europe (e.g. Bosnia,Croatia and above all Slovenia, where the United Left broke into parliamentary politics in 2014).Yet even today, most European countries have some half-dozen competing radical left parties, usually individuallyminiscule but salami-slicing an already fragile vote. Several of the earlier generation of ‘broad left’ parties unitingdiﬀerent ideological traditions (e.g. Rifondazione Comunista, the Scottish Socialist Party and the Portuguese LeftBloc) found schismatic traditions stubbornly persistent and have foundered as a result (the former two now on theedge of oblivion).Even some of the larger, more established parties such as the German Die Linke and Dutch Socialist Party havestruggled to increase their perspectives during the crisis. Gradual moderation to oﬀer governing perspectives hasoften risked disappointing more radical supporters while failing to fully convince new voters and coalition partnersthat they mean business, while the business community itself often weighs in heavily against the radical left andtheir supposedly obsolete, ‘extreme’ or ‘far left’ policies. At the same time the radical right often beneﬁts more thanthe radical left, mainly because they are more ideologically ﬂexible than the left and can appropriate left-wingarguments (defence of the welfare state, protection of workers) while the left often struggles to come up with apopular response to right-wing arguments. Repugnant though anti-immigration sentiment is, it can be electorallydynamic in a way that international solidarity is not.At the same time, Syriza’s success is clearly somewhat exceptional, with a remarkably propitious combination ofexternal and internal factors. Externally, as Stathis Kouvelakis has argued, Greece has suﬀered from anunprecedentedly violent socio-economic cataclysm resulting in political polarisation. Nowhere else in Europe(except Ukraine, for obviously very diﬀerent reasons) has experienced anything like this. Relatedly, the complete3/7collapse of the mainstream left PASOK because of its role in the imposition of the Troika’s policies (as well as insystemic corruption) has allowed Syriza to appropriate much of PASOK’s electoral space, activists and organisation,as well as leaving Syriza as one of the few untainted parties. Although social democrats are in trouble acrossEurope, nowhere else is ‘Pasokiﬁcation’ (yet) on the horizon.Simultaneously, Syriza possesses something of a magic formula for radical left party success; namely a populistideology that projects deﬁance and can unite diﬀerent ideological tendencies by articulating popular anger againstthe ‘establishment’; a pragmatic but principled approach to power (seeking government around clear anti-austerityprinciples, yet downplaying maximalist demands and proving ‘coalitionable’ with ideological opponents such as theIndependent Greeks).In addition, the party leadership’s calibre should not be dismissed lightly – it clearly (especially in Yanis Varoufakis)contains intelligent and charismatic individuals. Alexis Tsipras himself, although politically inexperienced, is ‘aneﬀective leader but not a charismatic one’, presenting a solidity, statesman-like quality and charm. Obviously, thesuccess of this leadership remains to be tested, and whether Tsipras has the stature or qualities to unite apotentially fractious party throughout future travails is unclear.Not to be forgotten is the party’s strong ties with the anti-austerity ‘Squares’ movement, which allows Syriza topresent itself as a genuinely ‘new’ force, even though its antecedent parties have been around for decades. For allthat some analysts see this as a recent product of Ernesto Laclau, or a new left populist spectre haunting thecontinent, the fact is that many other successful radical left parties have aspired to such qualities over the lastdecade or more; few however have acquired all of them, nor beneﬁtted from such a unique external environment.Sustaining the Syriza surgeIt is this singularity that means that there is unlikely to be an immediate ‘Syriza’ surge elsewhere in Europe. AsTable 2 shows, only in Spain and perhaps Denmark, are we likely to see dramatic gains for the radical left in 2015elections (although the quasi-left Sinn Féin has topped some recent Irish polls for the 2016 elections).Podemos is often portrayed as the next Syriza, and indeed Podemoseven possesses some advantages over Syriza(a more developed populist image as the defender of popular ‘common sense’, a still more charismatic and media-friendly leader in Pablo Iglesias, a centralised party structure, organic links with the anti-austerity Indignados and agreater authenticity as a ‘new’ force battling the corrupt establishment ‘caste’). That said, the barriers are stillformidable, with the Spanish Socialists much more resilient than PASOK (‘badly beaten but not defeated’), a modesteconomic recovery in progress, and the presence of the established United Left party likely to complicate mattersfurther. Indeed, Podemos’ early poll rise has started to stall.Table 2. Legislative elections forthcoming in 2015 (EU countries)4/7Source: adapted from Chiocchetti (2015)In the longer run Syriza’s victory can clearly have a galvanising eﬀect elsewhere, as indeed it already has: Tsiprashas already emerged as a left-wing ﬁgurehead, leading the European Left Party in the 2014 Euro elections, andinspiring a ‘Tsipras List’ to unite the fractious Italian left. But sustaining this ﬁgurehead status will depend on thelonger-term performance of the Syriza government, at the time of writing entirely unclear, as Greece and EU ‘havebecome stuck in a passive-aggressive standoﬀthat has made serious negotiation impossible’.Remember that Syriza is the ﬁrst anti-austerity but not the ﬁrst radical left government in Europe – such parties havegoverned alone in Cyprus and Moldova, as well as being in coalition in a half-dozen other countries in the lastdecade, although they have been satisﬁed with meagre adjustments to the neo-liberal status quo. If Syriza managesto gain even limited respite from Greece’s debt burden that allows it to soften domestic conditions and contribute torolling back austerity elsewhere, then this will be a comparative victory that can contribute to a credibilitybreakthrough for the radical left, and such parties’ increasing inclusion in governmental calculations elsewhere.Such an outcome is devoutly wished by many, not just on the radical left – the prestigious US Foreign Aﬀairs journal,hardly a bastion of Marxism, even called on the EU to make ‘some sort of deal with Syriza’, and (unlike manyanalyses) saw the radical left as a lesser evil than the radical right. On the other hand, if the EU continues playinghardball and the ‘Grexit’ scenario ensues or Syriza ends up capitulating to EU demands, this risks underminingalmost all the achievements Syriza has made to date and reinforcing the mainstream view of the radical left as aneconomic pariah. But the radical right may be the chief beneﬁciary, not least in Greece itself.That said, the longer-term opportunities for the radical left will remain brighter than for decades. After all, as Table 3shows, support for radical left ideologies is scarcely negligible in Europe now.5/7Table 3. Percentage of people who support radical left ideologies and average vote share for radical leftparties in European countriesNote: Column A shows the percentage of individuals who identify as having a ‘radical left’ideology (0-2 on a left-right scale in the European Social Survey 2002-12). Column B showsthe average percentage vote share for radical left (RL) parties in elections during this period.6/7Whereas one obviously cannot directly extrapolate party success from individual level data, the implication is that(particularly when protest voters are added in), the potential vote for such parties is in the vast majority of countriesconsiderably greater than their achieved success. Even in a notionally ‘post-austerity’ Europe, inequality, povertyand corruption will scarcely be dormant issues. And whatever Syriza’s actual policy successes prove to be, itselectoral performance demonstrates a ‘success formula’ of populism, principle and pragmatism that other partiesmay emulate more explicitly than before. If we add in the stirrings of radical left protest in Eastern Europe, thenSyriza will be the ﬁrst but not the last party of the anti-austerity left to gain power in Europe.Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note: An earlier version of this article appeared at the EPERN blog run by the University of Sussex. The article givesthe views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School ofEconomics. Featured image credit:  Uwe Hiksch (CC-BY-SA-3.0)Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1BoX6Ej_________________________________About the authorLuke March – University of EdinburghLuke March is Senior Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics, and Deputy Director of thePrincess Dashkova Russia Centre in the School of Social and Political Science at the University ofEdinburgh. His publications include Radical Left Parties in Europe (Routledge, 2011), and TheCommunist Party in Post-Soviet Russia(Manchester University Press, 2002).7/7

Beyond Syriza and Podemos, other radical left parties are threatening to break into the mainstream of European politics

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