Europe’s radical left is still struggling to articulate new strategies for social, economic and political change

The Emerging New Euroleft

by Hilary Wainwright Manchester

From my desk in the north of England, the grass seems considerably greener—or the poppies redder—across the
water in Europe. Here in Britain political look-alikes
compete frenetically for the center ground, and
politicians of the radical left are sidelined by a
grossly disproportionate electoral system. In contrast,
Norway’s Left Socialist Party is part of the
government; Italy’s radical Partito della Rifondazione
Comunista (Communist Refoundation Party, or PRC) is a
key player in L’Unione, the coalition that could well
defeat Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in this April’s
elections; Germany’s Linkspartei (Left Party)
potentially provides a new voice on the left; France’s
historically fissiparous left united to give the EU
constitution a resounding European "No!" Ripples from
this defeat of an arrogant political elite are evident
in the confident way that young people presume they can
block Prime Minister Villepin’s attempt to
neoliberalize the French labor market.

It’s not all onward and upward. In last year’s Spanish
elections the United Left lost all its seats in the
Madrid Parliament, partly because it was insufficiently
nimble in the face of the move left by Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero’s victorious Socialist Party, lifted
into office on a wave of antiwar opinion. The Swedish
Left Party is in disarray, while in Greece the
relatively innovative Synaspismos is numerically
overshadowed by the dogmatic and sectarian Greek
Communist Party. But the political landscape of Western
Europe is changing as disillusion with neoliberal
policies grows.

Parties coming from varying combinations of Communist,
Trotskyist and independent green-left traditions have
long acted as a magnet for popular disillusion with
mainstream politics. But the constituency for an
alternative to neoliberalism, whether Berlusconian or
Blairite, is now far greater than any electoral support
for the parties of the radical left. This constituency
is reflected in opinion polls indicating majorities
against both the Iraq War and privatization, in the
popularity of muckraking films like The Constant
Gardener and most of all in the continual eruption of
resistance to governments pursuing neoliberal agendas,
the French protests being the latest example.

Many of Europe’s radical left parties are still
struggling to develop new projects for social, economic
and political change. Increasingly self-conscious about
their own limitations, they are seeking to refound
themselves by working with the radical social
movements, organizations and networks that have
gathered momentum in recent years. They face a
Catch-22, however, because their efforts to innovate
are in constant tension with the organizational
imperatives of electoral politics. Yet without a more
fundamental renovation—including giving way to the
creation of entirely new political projects—they will
remain in the minority.

The most successful parties on the European left are
those that have immersed themselves in social
movements, especially the movements for global social
justice, while at the same time using electoral
footholds to open up political institutions. What is
happening across Western Europe is that significant
swaths of public opinion have far more radical
expectations than social democratic parties can meet,
but most of these voters are slow to shift party
loyalties. Consequently, it is through radical
movements independent of the political system, from
antiwar groups to trade union and community alliances
against privatization, that this opinion is gaining
organized expression. As a result, left parties that
have strong links with these movements are able to
punch way beyond their electoral strength, making gains
for political ideas that the movements and parties
share. "Social movements are the engines of
transformation," says Fausto Bertinotti, leader of
Italy’s Rifondazione and the Mediterranean maestro of
this strategy for outflanking conservative political
institutions. Political parties must recognize that
they are "but one actor among many," he insists.

Norway, with its uniquely proportional electoral
system, provides a laboratory for the radical left’s
experiment with a pluralist approach to power. (By
"pluralist," I mean a break from the idea that the
party has a monopoly on the process of social change,
and recognition of a plurality of sources of
transformative power.) "The changes we have achieved
would have been impossible without the pressure and
initiatives of the movements since Seattle," commented
Dag Seierstad of the Norwegian Socialist Left Party
(SV), which split from the Labor Party in 1961. The SV
provides the best Northern European example of this
dialectic between party and movement.

The SV’s twin-track strategy of working with a global
justice movement closely linked to trade unions and
campaigning electorally for a coalition of leftist
parties, including a reluctant Labor Party, first bore
fruit in 2001. The electoral consequences were
ambiguous: The SV won 12.5 percent of the vote and
twenty-three seats in Parliament, while Labor crashed
to 24.3 percent and forty-three seats and actually lost
the election to the Conservatives. But Labor’s
electoral collapse led the unions to start pushing for
a coalition with the SV, rather than the center-right.
When the left coalition won in 2005, the SV—a party
committed not only to defending public services and
public ownership but also to withdrawal from NATO—
actually found itself in government, even though its
share of the vote had dropped significantly, to 9
percent and only fifteen seats. The SV’s presence in
Norway’s governing coalition has already stopped in its
tracks the outgoing Conservative government’s
deregulation and privatization program. The SV can also
claim credit for the reallocation of Norway’s oil
surplus as development aid, the commitment to withdraw
Norwegian troops from Iraq and the actual withdrawal of
Norwegian special staff from NATO’s Afghanistan
operations.

The SV remains powerful because its presence provides a
channel into government for movements that have their
own social, economic and cultural strength. "Every day
of the three-week-long negotiations, there were
demonstrations outside that could be heard as we
talked," says Seierstad. The demonstrators symbolized
why the government must listen to the SV.

This is the kind of dynamic that the PRC is attempting
to reproduce in Italy. It has had some successes at the
local level, gaining both confidence and skill in this
new kind of socialist politics. Isadora D’Aimmo, a PRC
representative in the coalition government of the Left
Democrats (DS) in Naples, describes how "the presence
of Rifondazione forces the whole government to open the
door to movements and to people’s direct expression of
their needs. Take a small but typical example: The
regional government intended to build an incinerator in
the town of Acerra. We disagreed and insisted on
ecological ways of recycling waste. The people of
Acerra revolted. They were supported by the mayor, who
is a member of the PRC. It has been a revolt involving
every citizen: men, women, boys, girls, priests. No
incinerator has been built. That’s how we work, with
the movements to change the decisions of government and
also the way they take those decisions." The
parliamentary weight of the PRC on its own could never
have achieved such changes in regional policy.

In the last national elections, the PRC won only 6
percent of the vote, but by opening the political
process to popular participation it is trying to shift
the balance of forces in favor of radical change. At
the national level the aim therefore is not simply to
form a united front against Berlusconi but also,
through working relationships similar to those achieved
locally, to keep constant pressure on any new
government to break the logic of neoliberalism and find
an alternative way out of Italy’s deepening economic
crisis.

An equal partnership with the movements becomes a
necessary condition for radical social change. "We want
to be a resource for the movements without trying to
dominate them. It involves giving up on the sovereignty
of the party," says Nicola Fratoianni, regional
secretary of the party in Puglia, Southern Italy, where
the PRC’s gay Catholic Communist candidate won election
as regional governor last April through a campaign
whose momentum depended on the creativity and energy of
local gay, youth and other social movements.

The European Left Party (EL) was founded two years ago
to bring together leftist parties across Europe. So far
it is still a loose federation rather than a united
political grouping, but it has been a catalyst in the
chemistry of the reviving European left. "We learned a
lot from the Italians," says Christiane Reymann, a
feminist in the leadership of the German Party of
Democratic Socialists (PDS), now the dominant partner
in the Linkspartei. "Their influence was vital to
setting up the Linskpartei." Members of the French
Communist Party (PCF) express similar enthusiasm for
the EL: "The support of our partners in the EL was
crucial to the success of the European ’No,’" says
Elisabeth Gautier of Espaces Marx, a think tank
associated with the PCF.

In both France and Germany, however, the dynamic
between movement and party is less about government and
more about strategies for survival. With its share of
the vote down to 3.2 percent in 2002, the PCF risked
extinction. For those in the PCF whose goal was to
change society in their own lifetimes rather than
maintain a dying political machine, the only hope was
to put their remaining resources at the disposal of
those movements resisting France’s version of
neoliberalism. The innovators inside the party threw
themselves into the campaign against the EU
Constitution, where a strong grassroots movement joined
them with even such traditional enemies as the
Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League. But the
momentum of last year’s referendum victory will not be
enough to overcome the deeply rooted sectarianism
already re-emerging as the minds of the party loyalists
turn to the presidential elections of 2007. Both left
parties are reluctant to sacrifice the main opportunity
on the French political calendar to promote their brand
image in favor of a common candidate for the whole of
the "alternative left." But the latest mass resistance
is already breathing stronger life into the coalitions
of the left, which were formed under different names
across France during the fight for a European "No."

In France (and Germany too) the conservative
institutions that movement activists, including many
party members, have to outflank are those of the
parties of the left. In Germany the crisis of politics
following unification has presented the anti-
globalization movement and the anti-neoliberal trade
unions with a political opportunity for a radical
political voice but also with a tough challenge. The
Linkspartei is to some extent a very precarious
marriage of convenience: The PDS, though popular in the
east, faced a slow death as long as it remained in its
eastern ghetto lacking any representation in the
Bundestag. Meanwhile, in the western part of the
country, a significant group of regional trade union
leaders and engaged intellectuals led by former
economics minister Oskar Lafontaine split from the
Social Democratic Party to form the Election
Alternative for Employment and Social Justice. They
came together initially as an electoral alliance and
surprised themselves by winning 8.7 percent of the vote
and fifty-four seats in the Bundestag in last year’s
elections.

The leaders of the Linkspartei talk the talk of working
with the movements, but I doubt if many of their
leaders would really accept the proposition that they
are just "one actor among many." There is, however, a
significant minority who have been genuinely influenced
by their involvement in the new movements, including
the networks that are spreading through the European
Social Forum. They complain of the overly "managerial"
approach of the party leadership, who patronize the
movements and curb open discussion and autonomous
initiatives inside the party.

The strategy of opening parties and political
institutions to social movements seeks to release new
and powerful forces for political change. Three current
trends support it: First, the continuing, though
fragmented, resistance to various aspects of
neoliberalism, whether privatization, deregulation,
bureaucratically imposed development plans or war.
Second, the failure of sclerotic and often corrupt
political institutions to represent or debate this
widespread popular feeling adequately. Third, the
European context itself, which produces a rich cross-
fertilization of ideas and political cultures. Who
knows, someday it might even shake the institutions of
the British establishment. Indeed, with the Scottish
Socialist Party now eight years old—with six seats in
the Scottish Parliament and strong roots in Scotland’s
radical movements—the politics of pluralist
transformation already has a foothold even here in
Britain.

Hilary Wainwright’s most recent book is Reclaim the
State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (Verso).

Moderator’s Note: This was posted March 23, 2006,
prior to the recent elections in Italy.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/wainwright