Throughout western Europe, the right is enjoying a resurgence. The brief supremacy of social democracy is over. John Lloyd reports
The social democratic tide, which at its high water mark had seen almost all of the world's richest and largest states and all but two members of the European Union under centre-left leadership, has ebbed, and is flowing back. The last years of the 20th century ushered in a centre-left hegemony: it has been short-lived. Yet the resurgent right is neither coherent in its policies nor united in its aims.
In many of the countries that recently passed out of left control, the new rulers have turned to far-right parties to sustain coalition government. With that comes an increasing emphasis on strong law and order, opposition to liberal changes in personal and sexual behaviour and a harder line on immigration.
Within Europe, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Norway (not in the EU) and Spain have governments of the right: all but Spain and Ireland have been elected since 1999. In North America, Canada remains governed by centre-left liberals - but the US passed last year from the centrist Democratic administration of Bill Clinton to a George Bush administration that is pulled strongly both to the Christian fundamentalist and the neo-liberal right. Where the left appears securely in place, as in Britain and Canada, it is partly because it faces a weak and divided right.
The success of far-right (though not overtly racist or fascist) parties has been a feature of the turn of the century. When the Freedom Party of Jorg Haider became the major coalition party in the Austrian government with Wolfgang Schuessel's centre-right People's Party - and was rewarded with the vice-chancellorship and the portfolios of justice, finance, defence, infrastructure and social affairs - there were long and loud protests from the European Union. There were none, however, when the formerly fascist National Alliance led by Gianfranco Fini became the second partner to Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, and Fini was rewarded with the deputy premiership after the right's victory last year. Nor have there been protests over the many anti-immigrant outbursts of Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, the third partner in the coalition.
This pattern is visible elsewhere. In Norway, the centre-right coalition of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives needs the support of the 26 deputies of the far-right Progress Party (the country's second-largest party) to govern. This means it must accommodate the party's hostility to multiculturalism, its arguments for the repatriation of refugees and for a quota on immigration. In Denmark, the Conservative-Liberal coalition of Anders Rasmussen also relies on the support of 22 deputies of the Danish People's Party (Denmark's third-largest party) under the so-called "housewife leader", Pia Kjaersgaard. Her party runs campaigns to expose "welfare cheats" among immigrants.
This year, the European right reaches for the biggest prizes as the Continent's two largest economies, France and Germany, go to their national elections. In France, the opinion polls suggest a close call, but common wisdom in French political circles is that the right is presently better placed. "France is a country which is 60 per cent to the right," a senior French diplomat said. "That is its natural position, though it is sometimes led by the left when the right is weak." The Socialist Party leader and prime minister, Lionel Jospin (who will fight the presidency against the right-wing incumbent Jacques Chirac), has remained an ambiguous, even tortured figure - a new biography, Monsieur Ni-Ni, by the journalists Christine Mital and Erik Izraelewicz, shows him as a man "who wishes to renounce neither his [socialist] convictions nor his power". Unlike Tony Blair, he has never attempted to modernise the Socialist Party - preferring instead to follow his former leader and mentor Francois Mitterrand in a Delphic refusal to resolve the contradictions between doctrine and practice.
Jospin has presided over a government that has brought in a 35-hour week and created half a million new jobs: he remains, in his rhetoric, a man of the socialist left. Yet his government has privatised more than its two predecessors on the right and is consistently friendly to business. "I cut Fr10bn from business taxes when I was finance minister," said Dominique Strauss Kahn, a former finance minister who remains close to Jospin, "and Laurent Fabius [the present finance minister] cut Fr10bn from income tax, both far more than the right. Under the Socialists, public spending had gone up 1.8 per cent in five years: under the right, it went up 1.8 per cent each year. We Socialists have moved a lot in the last five years: we are no longer the tax and spend party we were."
Strauss Kahn, who is pressing Jospin to run on his economic record (of high growth and declining unemployment), wants a serious commitment to new Labour-type policies: Jospin, as ever, hesitates. Chirac is likely to wish to fight on law and order, immigration and security - all themes with which the Socialists feel uncomfortable. Since 11 September, the formerly fading star of the far right National Front leader Jean-Marie le Pen has gained some new lustre; while the socialist-nationalist Jean Pierre Chevenement, who resigned from Jospin's cabinet because of his opposition to autonomy for Corsica, is scoring reasonably well in the opinion polls, at around 10 per cent.
Germany, which has elections in September, now has a clear choice. The Christian Social Union's Edmund Stoiber, the prime minister of the state of Bavaria, has emerged as the CDU-CSU coalition's candidate for the chancellorship. The East German Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, the other party in the coalition, stood aside when polls showed Stoiber as the more popular candidate. Merkel was a centrist in the Helmut Kohl tradition; Stoiber's record is as a right-wing politician, both on the economy and on social issues.
Since the leftist finance minister Oskar Lafontaine abruptly left his government in its first months, the chancellor Gerhard Schroder has followed a generally new Labour (Neue Mitte, or new middle) route - though the sensitivities within his Social Democratic Party have prevented him from proclaiming it too loudly. This has caused some pain: Reinhardt Hesse, one of his speechwriters, says that "when you modernise, and give tax concessions to corporations and insist on more flexibility in working practices, you get applause from the business side. Then we have to ask ourselves if we can avoid the criticism of those on our own side who see us as traitors."
Schroder's reforms will continue: the government is about to bring in a measure to subsidise workers who take low-paid jobs, a policy that neatly combines Keynesianism with neo-liberalism. However, unemployment remains very high, at four million - and the government is now reduced to claiming, rather desperately, that at least it is not as high as it was when it took office (it was then 4.5 million). At the same time, Schroder has retreated on a number of his planned reforms, notably on pensions, as the trade unions and other resistance mobilised strongly against him.
As it does in the Netherlands and Sweden, organised labour plays a still-forceful role within the main parties of the left and has a strong influence on government - not always, as experience in all these states has shown, to their electoral disadvantage. The Dutch "Polder" model - the name by which the 20-year-old agreement between state, trade unions and employers on investment, job creation and pay moderation is known - is one that commended itself to all left-of-centre and some right-of-centre parties, though it has proven more difficult to imitate in practice than admire in theory. However, trade union influence on governments of the left, especially where that was not accompanied by an obvious decrease in strikes - Italy under the centre-left Ulivo coalition was a prime example of this - is not popular, and could rebound against Schroder, struggling to get a deal with the powerful IG Metall engineering union.
Edmund Stoiber heads the most successful of Germany's states, and the one with among the lowest unemployment figures - half the national average of around 10 per cent. Though he is no doctrinaire free- marketeer - he has used his Landbank to prop up failing industries - he is generally on the tax-cutting/privatisation/small state side of the argument. He can argue with some conviction - in an economy whose growth is now among the lowest in Europe - that Schroder's reforms have been too slow and too late.
Perhaps more to the point, he is a social conservative, who makes clear his devotion to Roman Catholicism and to his family, implicitly in contrast to Schroder's four marriages and no children of his own. He has been vocally hostile to same-sex unions, to the change in the citizenship laws that would allow Turkish guest-workers to take German citizenship, and to immigration.
One of his most famous soundbites was "Kinder statt Inder" ("Children instead of Indians"), coined when the government proposed bringing in thousands of Indian computer engineers and software designers to fill jobs in Germany's electronics industry. All of a sudden, an election victory for the right seems a real prospect - a big shock for a government that has enjoyed a strong lead ever since the CDU tore itself apart after corruption charges stuck against Helmut Kohl.
The result of the right's recovery is not only a growth in anti-immigration rhetoric and policies, but also a rise in Euroscepticism. This was once the preserve of the left; now the rightist parties all over Europe are inclined to take a Thatcherite view of the EU. They see it, not as a stimulus to free markets and competition, but as a medium through which leftists can drive through legislation they cannot get accepted in their own countries. The constraints placed on governments by the common currency and the agreement on economic stability - as Heather Grabbe, research director of the Centre for European Reform, points out - have left room for right-wing populists to harass their coalition partners. The Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi recently fired his Euro-enthusiast foreign minister Renato Ruggiero, after Ruggiero had sparred with Umberto Bossi, the Northern Alliance leader, over the latter's Europhobic outbursts.
The governing parties of the left, which meet in February for the Stockholm Progressive Summit, the next in the series of International Network for Progressive Governance meetings which began in 1997, will find their ranks much depleted. They may be depleted further by the end of this year. The most stable pole of the left in Europe - indeed, in the west - is the UK. A sign of how much the world has changed.
Europe: the right stuff
France
Centre-right parties are widely expected to overthrow the governing centre-left parties in elections this year. If the centre-right president, Jacques Chirac, also returns to office, the right will enjoy undisputed power.
Germany
The centre-right CDU-CSU coalition, led by Edmund Stoiber, has a serious chance of success in September 2002 elections. The latest polls put Stoiber, who has highlighted anti-immigration and Eurosceptic views, level with the Social Democrat chancellor, Gerhard Schroder.
Italy
Ruled by Silvio Berlusconi, of the right-wing Forza Italia, with the extreme right Northern League and National Alliance, after elections last year.
Spain
While the Socialist Party plunged to its worst showing in 20 years, Jose Maria Anzar's right-wing Popular Party won a second term in 2000.
Portugal
Socialists are still in power, but only just. Elections are due in February or March; the two main right-wing parties made big gains in local elections last month, prompting the prime minister's resignation.
Sweden
Still ruled by the Social Democratic Party. Elections are due in September 2002, but the right seems unlikely to win power.
Norway
A centre-right coalition ousted the ruling Labour Party in the 2001 elections, thanks to the support of Carl Hagen's Progress Party. Hagen argues for repatriation of refugees and a quota on immigration.
Denmark
A right-wing coalition came to power two months ago. The far-right Danish People's Party - whose leader says "it's a problem in a Christian country to have too many Muslims" - emerged as the third-largest party.
Belgium
The 1999 election saw victory for a centre-right coalition. The PM, Guy Verhofstadt, leads the Flemish Liberal Democrats whose policies include deregulation, privatisation and less social security.
Netherlands
The Labour-dominated coalition looks likely to remain in power after this year's elections, despite recent rises in opinion poll support for the right.
Austria
Ruled for nearly a year by a right-wing coalition that includes the far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party.
Switzerland
A four-party coalition has been in power for decades. But the Swiss People's Party - anti-welfare, anti-EU and anti-UN - made considerable gains in 1999 to become the second-biggest party.
Research by Tim Burroughs
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