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In spite of their rhetoric, the right’s solutions to the crisis will lead to ordinary people paying the costs.
This past year has been overshadowed by the dark clouds of economic crisis.
Ordinary people have taken many hard knocks. Unemployment is rising. Businesses
are going bust. Homes have been repossessed. Pensions have been decimated
by stock market falls and corporate defaults. In short, the near-meltdown
of the financial system has revealed the dangerous consequences of thirty
years of conservative ideology on the self-correcting wisdom of the market.
Many assumed that social democrat parties – as champions of the people
and critics of the market – would make a political comeback. How wrong
they were.
Bar notable exceptions in Greece, Portugal and Norway, 2009 will be the
year that most of Europe’s social democrat parties looked into the
abyss. Our particularly bad showing in June’s European elections has
been compounded by big vote losses in Germany and Bulgaria. Where we are
in government, we are suffering the burden of incumbency in a crisis; and
elsewhere, while we are almost always the second force in politics, other
parties to our left and to the far right have capitalised on the pain of
recession.
I believe this year can teach us many lessons for the future.
First, the biggest vote winner in 2009 has been without a doubt the ‘sofa’
party. It is apathy that has topped the polls across almost the whole of
the European Union – 57 per cent of Europe’s 375 million citizens
did not turn up to vote in June.
2009 has also seen a further rise of the nationalist right. This is symptomatic
of the wide-open field we’ve left on identity politics. In today’s
globalised world, the competitive pressures on the individual are huge –
work pressures due to a push for higher productivity and higher skills;
economic pressures from squeezed wages and rising housing and living costs;
social pressures due to the rise of status and celebrity culture; and the
pressures of combining work and family life in the absence of supportive
policies such as child care, not least for single parents. And society is
not only becoming more competitive; it is also more diverse. Grotesque inequalities
bring more and more people to our shores, in search of refuge from persecution
or simply a better life. In an age of flux and uncertainty, people want
to regain a sense of control over their lives by asserting their identity.
Nationalist parties offer a convenient vent for this desire. That’s
the vacuum we’ve left and they’ve filled.
To some extent, people believe that politics doesn’t matter anymore.
The right have done a lot to promote this vision of ‘the end of politics’,
to paraphrase a famous neoconservative historian. The new rhetoric of the
right is cloaked in social democratic language. We are, in a sense, the
victims of our own success. We’ve spent the best part of a century
building up welfare states that have now become indisputable in public debate.
The right wing denounces bankers’ bonuses as much as – and sometimes
better than – the left.
But, in time, I think the crisis will reveal the gaping chasm between right-wing
rhetoric and reality. Necessary investments to raise educational levels,
cut unemployment and build a strong and sustainable economy will not take
place. Loud denouncements of financial excesses will not compel conservatives
to fight for financial reform in the EU and at the G20.
The truth is that, under conservative leadership, people will end up paying
the costs of this crisis three times over. First, through picking up the
bill for bank and company bailouts; then through losses in their jobs and
livelihoods; and finally through stealth cuts and public under-investment,
which will undermine our well-being and long-term growth potential.
Social democratic parties have to organise our fight-back against a resurgent
right. We’ve got to put fairness back at the centre of the crisis
response: root-and-branch financial reform; a financial speculators’
tax; investments for inclusive, smart, green growth; a renewed social justice
agenda to reverse inequalities, in our countries but also with the developing
world; and a global climate deal to avert disaster for the planet and those
who’d be affected most: the poor.
I believe that if there is a return to business as usual in the financial
markets at a time of rising unemployment, ordinary people will realise that
conservative passivity has failed to benefit them. When that happens, I
believe Europe’s social democratic parties should be ready with a
strong and convincing agenda for transformational change.
For this reason, I am planning that the Party of European Socialists Congress
on 7-8 December 2009 will be the place where Europe’s social democratic
family steps back from the brink and takes the decisive steps to strengthen
and revitalise our movement for a return to progressive government. Sooner,
rather than later, social democrats must represent the change people can
believe in.
Poul Nyrup
Rasmussen is one of the most prominent centre-left figures in European
politics, and is president of the Party of European Socialists (PES), which
brings together Europe’s socialist, social democrat, progressive and
labour parties. He is also Co-Chair of the Global Progressive Forum. In
1988 he became a member of the Folketinget (Danish Parliament)
for the Social Democratic Party, and from 1993 to 2001 he was Danish Prime
Minister. In 2004 he led the Danish Social Democrats to victory in the European
elections and was himself elected to the European Parliament, where he sat
on both the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Economic and Monetary Affairs
Committee, until June 2009.
To read more articles,
and make a comment, go to
http://www.goodsociety.social-europe.eu
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