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Andrew Scott
As the Australian example shows, the social-democratic model is still capable of winning back support.
As the Rudd Labor Party Government in Australia celebrates two years in office following the party's eleven years in opposition it is is vital that it does not now re-enact Blair and Brown's own re-enactment of previous Australian Labor Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating, as this will not be a forward-looking strategy.
The more thorough, substantial and successful approach of the northern European social-democratic nations in policy terms needs now to be examined for Australia. There are some positive signs that there are wider international influences possibly at work, at least in some sections of the Rudd government. These include the belated introduction of paid parental leave to Australia.
In terms of the lessons which can be learned from the Australian Labor Party (ALP) by European social-democratic parties, which have not enjoyed much electoral success recently, several points can be made
The first is that the electoral cycle does still regularly turn. With young, alternative leaders and visionary policies emphasising the economic as well as social benefit of more substantial public investment in education, employment and infrastructure, and care for the environment, social-democratic parties can oust governments of the right.
European social-democratic parties' recent defeats and current problems have partly arisen because of divisions within their constiuencies between socially progressive and traditional economically-minded voters, divisions of the kind which also kept the ALP out of office from 1996 to 2007. Australian Labor's return to office and present popularity show the merits for social democrats of moving back onto core and distinctive economic policy ground.
The campaign by Nicolas Sarkozy against 'illegal migrants' and their children to court former Le Pen voters in 2007 was reminiscent of former Australian conservative prime minister John Howard's moves against asylum seekers in 2001 to win back people who had voted for Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in Australia in 1998.
John Howard's promise when first elected that 'no Australian worker will be worse off' under his government, his rhetoric about wanting Australia to feel more 'comfortable and relaxed', and his conservative cultural policies, all gained some workers' support. However he trailed badly in opinion polls as soon as Kevin Rudd was elected Labor Leader in December 2006, largely because of his government's introduction of an industrial relations policy which heightened insecurity and reduced fairness.
The French Socialists in 2007 improved their standing compared with the 2002 presidential election when the party failed to make it into the second ballot. Sarkozy's victory was only by a few percentage points. If Sarkozy actually takes steps which seriously undermine France's 'social model', and which threaten French workers' rights and conditions, as Howard did in Australia, then France's Socialist Party can expect support to return to it, as economic questions become more central again for voters, especially if differences between the main parties on these questions become more clearly articulated.
Sarkozy, and the re-elected conservative German Chancellor Merkel, have in international forums held since the global financial crisis in 2009 supported stronger regulation of executive salaries and bonuses. This has been in contrast to the more timid approach taken by left-of-centre leaders in the English-speaking world, including Rudd, Brown and US President Obama. This highlights how social democrats in the English-speaking world have moved too far from traditional economic policy positions.
The policy legacy substantially shaped by social democrats in countries like Germany and even more so in Sweden and Denmark, where social democrats are not currently in office, continues to inspire many seeking more substantial change in Australia and elsewhere. This suggests that as part of trying to achieve more electoral success and regain lost fragments of their constituencies, European social democrats should more proudly identify with, and claim credit for, their own policy achievements and traditional approaches. They should put forward ways to uphold these, rather than defensively distance themselves from them in a way which allows politicians on the right to fill the resultant gap.
Andrew Scott is a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and author of three books and many other publications focusing on Australian and international labour politics. This is an edited extract of a paper which will shortly be published by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung as part of its Monitoring Social Democracy series at: http://www.fes.de/ipa/inhalt/monitor_e.php.
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