HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------Euro Brief: Europe's left bounces back
By Gareth Harding
UPI Europe Correspondent
From the International
Desk
Published
9/16/2002 3:32 PM
BRUSSELS, Belgium, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- It has been a good week for Europe's beleaguered center-left, which ran most of the continent's capitals throughout much of the 1990s before suffering a string of disastrous defeats early in the new millennium.
The collapse of Austria's government due to internal squabbles within the right-wing coalition will almost certainly see the left return to power when elections are held in late November.
In Germany, Gerhard Schroder's deft handling of the floods coupled with his opportunistic opposition to an Iraqi invasion has boosted his chances of remaining chancellor after Sunday's election.
Having languished 7 percent behind his Conservative rival, Edmund Stoiber, for much of the year, the latest opinion polls show Schroder in the lead for the first time.
In a raucous election rally with Green group leader Joshka Fischer Sunday, Schroder warned that the Sept. 22 election "which face the future Europe will have."
Calling on the electorate to reject the drift to the right that has taken place in the European Union over the past two years, the chancellor told party faithful in Berlin: "What I want is a signal from Germany that this process (of conservative supremacy) is at an end."
Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, who Sunday increased the Social Democrat party's share of the vote in that country's elections to win his third consecutive term, was also aware of the European dimension of his victory when he spoke to supporters at a post-election party in Stockholm.
"We broke the trend. Next week our German comrades can follow us," Persson said.
The Swedish result was a personal triumph for the EU's longest-serving premier. But it also showed that the center-left does not have to pander to populism or dress up in right-wing clothing to win power.
Persson fought an unashamedly 'Old Labor' campaign based on high taxes and high welfare bills. It is a recipe that has kept the Social Democrats in power in Sweden for five of the past six decades and on Sunday the country's 7 million voters asked for another serving.
The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which only last year was on the verge of all-out civil war, is hardly a key piece in the left's jigsaw; but on Sunday voters in this tiny Balkan state opted to boot out the ruling nationalist party and replace it with a Social Democrat government.
The move is symptomatic of a steady drift to the left in the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe that are set to join the EU in 2004.
Within the past year, left-wing parties have been handed the keys of state in the region's three economic powerhouses -- Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. There is also likely to be a leftward swing in Slovakia in the Sept. 20 elections.
There is no doubt that EU states have swung sharply to the right in the past 2-1/2 years -- voters in Austria, Denmark, France, Italy and Portugal have all turfed out Social Democrat governments, while the Irish and Spanish electorates have reconfirmed their preference for conservative rule.
However, there is a tendency to exaggerate the rightward shift in Europe as a whole. In Britain, Tony Blair's Labor Party has become the natural party of government, with the opposition Conservatives expected to lose their third election in a row in 2003 or 2004. An opinion poll published in Belgian daily Le Soir Monday showed the "purple coalition" of Liberals, Greens and Socialists on course for another thumping victory next year. And in Greece and Finland, left-wing parties are firmly entrenched in power.
If Social Democrats win in the German and Austrian elections this year, as most political commentators are now predicting, the center-left will be in power in seven of the EU's 15 member states. And when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe join the club, the enlarged Union is likely to have a progressive majority once more.
So as Europe's rightist leaders prepare to meet in Estoril, Portugal, next month to agree a new blueprint for the EU, they would be advised to tone down the triumphalism and remember that politics, like markets, follows cycles.
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(Euro Brief is a weekly column by Gareth Harding, UPI's Europe Correspondent)
Copyright © 2002 United Press Internationalhttp://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20020916-103541-1234r
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