The European citizens called to the polls throughout 2022 left a lot of bad news for the social democratic family, which is celebrating its party conference in Berlin this weekend.
The group reaped a remarkable winning streak from September last year to January, with victories in general elections in Norway, Germany, Portugal and positive Italian local elections. It was plausible to interpret that in the midst of the enormous challenges of our time, many citizens made it a point to opt for the historic builders of social security. But from then on – since António Costa’s victory in Portugal in January – a calvary of elections has opened up.
In France, the socialist formation was virtually annihilated in the spring presidential and parliamentary elections, buried between the power of Macron’s liberal center and that of Mélenchon’s Eurosceptic left. In September, the PD suffered a heavy defeat in Italy’s recent parliamentary elections. In Sweden, voters have ousted the Social Democrats from power and only yesterday the conservative side sealed a government pact with external support from the far right. As the year progressed, other worrying signs piled up on his desk, such as the two bitter defeats in Spain’s regional elections – Castilla y León and Andalusia – or a new move towards parliamentary irrelevance in Bulgaria in the second-day elections, another symptom of the great difficulty in gaining a foothold on the eastern flank of the EU. In Denmark, the socialist executive had to call snap elections when the majority that supported them collapsed: it remains to be seen how the planned vote will turn out in a few weeks.
The panorama of the surveys is not encouraging either. The extrapolation of the seats in the European Parliament by the organization Europe Elects based on national polls also reflects a decline in the family, which at the end of last year managed to overtake the EPP in this chart for a short time for the first time since 2016. In Germany, has The SPD won an important victory in the state of Lower Saxony, but at the national level their voting intention has fallen sharply in recent months. In Spain, the PSOE is entering the final phase of the legislative period with unfavorable poll numbers.
What’s happening? The social-democratic delegate meetings in Berlin are facing a complex analysis and recipe exercise. Of course, this includes the normal pendulum cycles of politics: you win and you lose, defeats today can give way to victories tomorrow. In addition, of course, each of the recent defeats has specific causes, such as the inability to form a competitive and coherent coalition in Italy or the erosion of power in Sweden. But there are some similarities.
Perhaps the primary concern is to assume that there is no automatic link between citizens’ desire for protection in a turbulent world and a commitment to the social democratic offer. A very large portion of the popular classes that are now faltering and were once a great fishing ground for this family are choosing other options. For radical proposals that antagonize a system that doesn’t work for them and in which the Social Democrats are considered co-authors, both in the national-populist tonality “Le Pen type” and left-wing populist “Mélenchon, five stars”. Or just let everything go: with an unprecedented abstinence like in France or Italy.
In this context, the Social Democrats will have to make do with a very tight ceiling. If it caters to the instincts of moderation, pragmatism, responsibility, and environmentalism of the sophisticated urban middle class (perhaps their main catch today), they leave out the popular strata who want radical, protectionist change, unwilling to make a green sacrifice in the cold. When they take the path of avant-garde defense of identity rights, young people win, but older people lose. Very complex to find the exact point. “Medio tutissimus ibis” (in the middle you will surely go), Ovid pointed out in the famous verse of the Metamorphoses. Where will this medium be? We are all looking for a focus, permanently or even for a while. Being unreservedly acknowledging what is wrong is often a good starting point for the search.
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