The Post-1989 Radical Left in Europe

Marcello Musto

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought about a profound change in the European political landscape. The structural political upheavals, together with major economic transformations, set in train a process of capitalist restoration that had severe social repercussions on a global scale. In Europe, anti-capitalist forces found their influence being irresistibly squeezed: it became more and more difficult for them to organise and orientate social struggles, and ideologically the Left as a whole lost the hegemonic positions it had won after 1968 in key areas of many national cultures.

This reverse was also apparent at an electoral level. From the 1980s on, the parties united around the idea of Eurocommunism, as well as those still strongly tied to Moscow, suffered a sharp decline in support, which turned into a veritable crash after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A phase of reconstruction then began, in which new political formations often emerged through the regrouping of anti-capitalist elements still in existence. This enabled the traditional forces of the Left to open up to the ecological, feminist, and peace movements that had developed in the previous decades. Izquierda Unida in Spain, created in 1986, was the pioneer in this respect. Similar initiatives took shape in Italy and Greece, in 1991, when the Communist Refoundation Party and Synaspismos came into being. In other countries, there were attempts (some only cosmetic) to renew the parties that had existed before the fall of the Berlin Wall, like with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), in Germany, which took over from the Socialist Unity Party that had ruled the GDR since 1949.

These new parties, like others that had not changed their name, managed to retain a political presence on their respective national stages. Together with the social movements and progressive trade-union forces, they contributed to the heightened resistance against neoliberal policies after 1993, when the Maastricht Treaty came into effect and set rigid monetarist parameters for new member-states joining the European Union. In 1994 a European United Left group was formed in the European Parliament.

In the mid-1990s, buoyed up by strikes and large demonstrations against their respective governments (Berlusconi in Italy, Juppé in France, González and Aznar in Spain), some forces of the radical Left even achieved modest electoral breakthroughs. Izquierda Unida scored 13.4% in the European elections in 1994; the Communist Refoundation Party 8.5% in the national elections of 1996; and the French Communist Party almost 10% in the parliamentary elections of 1997.
As the new century dawned, a huge, politically heterogeneous movement of struggle against neoliberal globalisation spread to every corner of the globe. Mass protests at the summits of the G8 and the IMF, together with the birth of the World Social Forum, in Brazil in 2001, encouraged broader discussion of alternatives to the dominant policies.

Meanwhile, with the rise of Tony Blair in the UK, the way was open for a profound shift in the ideology and program of the Socialist International. Blair's ‘Third Way’ – in fact, supine acceptance of the neoliberal mantra masked by the vacuous exaltation of ‘the new’ – was supported in varying degrees and forms by many European governments.

Many countries of southern Europe saw the whittling down of what remained of the welfare state, attacks on the pension system, another massive round of privatisation, the commodification of education, drastic cuts in the funding of research and development, and a lack of effective industrial policies. Similar choices operated in Eastern Europe.

As regards economic policy, it is hard to detect anything more than minimal differences between these social-democratic governments and conservative regimes in power at the time. Indeed, in many cases the social-democratic or center-left administrations were more efficient in carrying through the neoliberal project since the trade unions found the government actions more acceptable because of an old illusory belief that they were ‘friendly’ to the labour movement. Foreign policy orientations involved a similar discontinuity in the past (see the NATO bombing in Kosovo, the Iraq war, and the intervention in Afghanistan).

The Socialist parties often shunted the ecological question into declarations of principle, but almost never translated these into effective legislation to solve the major problems facing the environment.This was helped by the moderate turn on the part of most Green parties, which, in choosing to ally indiscriminately with parties of the Right or Left, mutated into ‘post-ideological’ formations and gave up the battle against the existing mode of production.

The shifts in European social democracy, involving uncritical acceptance of capitalism and all the principles of neoliberalism, demonstrated that the events of 1989 had shaken not only the Communist camp but all the progressive forces. For these abandoned any reforming ambition and no longer espoused the kind of state intervention in the economy that had been their main distinguishing feature after World War II.

Despite these profound changes, many parties of the European radical Left allied themselves with social-democratic forces. The neoliberal wind that blew unopposed, together with the absence of large social movements capable of shaping government actions in a socialist direction, evidently represented a negative constellation for radical left-wing parties. The anti-capitalist Left did not succeed in extracting any significant social gains that ran counter to the basic economic guidelines; all they could achieve was an occasional feeble palliative. Most often, they had to swallow a bitter pill and vote for measures against which they had earlier promised the most intransigent opposition. Yet the results at the ballot box were disastrous everywhere. In the presidential elections of 2007, the French Communists obtained less than 2% of the vote, and the next year Izquierda Unida hit rock bottom with a score of 3.8%. In Italy, for the first time in the history of the Republic, the Communists were shut out of parliament, reaching a dismal total of 3.1%.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 3, Jul 14 - 20, 2024