Back to the future in Europe

Or has it? There are some mitigating factors. The success of the far right has to be put into perspective. This is not a return to National Socialism or 1930s-style fascism. And voters are not entirely disillusioned. In Germany, participation was even up on last time. A positive spin would be that the European electorate is like the children who misbehave to attract their parents' attention. There is a sense that Europe's political class has begun to ignore the people who put them in power. Nowhere is this more palpable than in Britain, where voters no longer trust the competence of the government nor the integrity of politicians of all parties who supplement their incomes by systematic, if petty, fiddles on their expenses. Above all the elections are a wake-up call to the European left.

The left appears to have been the worst affected by Sunday's poll, although the reasons do not appear to be the same in every case. Britain's New Labour is being punished for its handling of the recession. France's Socialists have not shown themselves to be a convincing opposition, and some of their expected support has fled to Daniel Cohn-Bendit's Europe Ecologie. The German Social Democrats also appear in disarray. However, as Henryk M. Broder points out in the current issue of Der Spiegel, one of the reasons for the left's poor electoral performance is that the right-wing parties have already stolen the most attractive planks of their program. We are more used to thinking that it is the newish European left that has plundered from the right. The classic example was Tony Blair, whose New Labour called a truce with post-Thatcher Britain and distanced his party from the once powerful trade union movement and the rhetoric of class politics. Broder reminds us that the opposite is also true. The social democratic world view is now commonplace, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is sometimes greener than the Greens, and her sister Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria is to the left of the socialist Social Democratic Party (SPD) on some issues, he writes.

Older readers will recall that Turkey's self-declared social democrats pretty much sat on the sidelines while their European counterparts got on with a process of reform. If anything, they became more right wing under their current leader, Deniz Baykal -- more nationalist, more dismissive of Kurdish cultural rights and more protective, not so much of organized labor but of the bureaucratic custodians of the Turkish state. At the same time the Turkish right stole their mantle of social inclusiveness and appeared concerned to make welfare provision for those in need. And while there has been no practical reform of the 1982 Constitution (penned under conditions of martial law), it is the right in Turkey who have made noises about its replacement or reform.