by SUSAN WATKINS
French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon (in red scarf) with his hand on Spanish politician Pablo Iglesias’s shoulder PHOTO/Paris Match
Oppositions were slow to materialize in the advanced economies after the crash of 2008; understandably so. Labour movements had long been neutered; erstwhile social-democratic parties had become cheerleaders for financial deregulation. Rump lefts had failed to grow in thirty years; late-90s alter-globo movements seemed to have been wrong-footed by the harsher international climate of the war on terror. It was not until 2010 that protesters took to the streets in any numbers, with Greece, the country worst hit by the crisis, leading the way. In 2011, hundreds of thousands more joined their ranks, from Madrid to Zuccotti Park and Oakland, in the movement of the squares. In the us, amid renewed feminist ferment on the campuses, the first protests began that would grow into Black Lives Matter.
But only in the last few years have left oppositions started to produce national political projects with an impact at state level—flanked, and sometimes outflanked, by the radical right. Again, Greece was in the lead: the Syriza coalition took 27 per cent in June 2012; it constituted itself as a political party the following summer. In France, Front de gauche candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon got 4 million votes in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections. A year later, Italy’s Five Star Movement won 26 per cent of the vote, the highest score in the Chamber of Deputies. In 2014 Podemos was launched in Spain, overlapping with a mass independence movement in Catalonia, while Scotland’s referendum saw an unprecedented mobilization around national autonomy. In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn was swept to the head of the British Labour Party by a groundswell of revolt against New Labour itself. Six months later, Bernie Sanders’s run for the 2016 Democratic nomination is chalking up some 7 million votes for a democratic-socialist ‘political revolution’ in the United States.
How long this constellation will last is another matter. Sanders’s campaign as such will end with the Democratic convention in July. Tsipras’s swift passage from leader of the Eurozone opposition to sulky factotum for the Troika is indication enough of how fragile and fast-changing their fortunes may be. Many on the Italian left would deny that Beppe Grillo deserves a place in their ranks; not without reason. Corbyn faces obsessive Blairite plotting for his overthrow. Mélenchon’s Parti de gauche has suffered damaging losses. At the time of writing—four months after Spain’s inconclusive elections—Podemos’s future is subject to so many countervailing factors that it is impossible to say where the party will be a year from now. Bearing this in mind, any characterization of these forces can only be provisional—a snapshot of how things look in the spring of 2016. Nor can this handful of countries represent the whole advanced-capitalist region: a fuller picture would include both Canada and Germany, where there has been no renewal of the left, as well as the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, Ireland and Portugal. All the same, a comparative assessment of these new lefts’ strengths and weaknesses may produce results whose relevance could be tested elsewhere. What contexts have shaped the emergence of these oppositions? What political forms have they taken? What positions do they champion? What stances have they taken towards the mainstream parties?
1. CONTEXTS
The common context for all the new lefts is anger at the political management of the Great Recession. The outcomes vary: after seven years of zero interest rates, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and quantitative easing, the us and uk are officially in recovery, while Greece and Spain are still far below pre-crisis levels; less severely affected by the crash, France and Italy were suffering from stagnant growth and high structural unemployment well before 2008. Across the board, the super-rich have done best out of the crisis—during Obama’s first term, over 90 per cent of income growth in the us went to the top 1 per cent—while the young have borne the brunt of it. In each country, the ebbing tide has exposed the hypocrisy and corruption at the top of the system: Tony Blair, Jean-Claude Juncker, the Clintons.
A second shared feature is the collapse of the centre-left parties, whose win-win ‘Formula Two’ of Third Way neoliberalism was the governing ideology of the boom-and-bubble years on both sides of the Atlantic. [1] Having abandoned their former social-democratic moorings and working-class constituencies, Europe’s Third Way parties were now punished in turn, whether for deregulating finance and pumping credit bubbles, or for implementing the subsequent bailouts and cuts: Blair had already lost 3 million votes between 1997 and 2005, but Brown shed another million in 2010; psoe’s vote fell by nearly 6 million between 2008 and 2015; pasok was virtually eliminated, dropping from over 3 million votes to under 300,000 between 2009 and 2015, while in France, Hollande has plunged from 52 to 15 per cent in the polls since 2012. This rightward shift by the ex-social democrats—often into ‘grand coalitions’ with the conservatives—opened up a representational vacuum on the left of the political spectrum; the centre-right parties have stayed closer to their original constituents. A different pattern holds in the us, where the Democrats’ popular vote has remained steady—the lesser evil—and a fifty-fifty split has prevailed between them as both parties glided to the right.
Third, blowback from the worsening crisis of Western intervention and civil war in the Middle East and North Africa has begun to overlap with the economic debacle, in Europe if not America. France and Britain have been in the forefront of the wars, Greece and Italy the recipients of their victims. If Blair led the eu contingents in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, Hollande is now the eu’s most hawkish leader. After Libya, French military intervention in Mali in 2013 became a bridgehead for Operation Barkhane, targeting supposed jihadists across Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad; Hollande then joined Obama in pounding Iraqi and Syrian lands. At first, only a tiny percentage of the tens of millions displaced by the fighting succeeded in crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, Greece or Spain. But in 2015, a million refugees reached Europe from the widening arc of war. Meanwhile France and Britain—not only the eu’s main aggressors there, but with large, relatively deprived, Muslim populations of their own—have seen Islamist terror attacks against civilian targets. Blair responded with stepped-up surveillance and pre-emptive policing, Hollande imposed a state of emergency. Under these conditions, the civil-rights parameters in which opposition movements can function have been narrowed and their foreign policies thrown into relief.
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