MW: Europe’s revolt isn’t just in Greece or Spain
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Greek voters crowded into Athens’ Syntagma Square to celebrate the landslide election of the leftist Syriza party last month, just as they had the victory of the center-left Pasok party in 1981, which ushered in Greece’s first leftist government after it threw off military dictatorship in 1974.
The tens of thousands of Spanish voters who filled Madrid’s Puerta del Sol last Saturday also wanted to celebrate the leftist victory in Greece and rally support for a similar result for Spain’s new left-wing party, Podemos, in parliamentary elections at the end of this year.
But the electoral victory of Syriza and the rise of Podemos are not signs of a resurgence of the left in Europe.
The huge square in Madrid was also filled with demonstrators in May 2011 when a wave of protests opposed the Socialist government’s willingness to go along with European Union austerity policies.
One of the major ironies of the eurozone crisis, in fact, is that the historic left-wing parties in Europe have been so compromised by the austerity policies dictated by Brussels and Berlin that they have lost significant voter support or collapsed altogether.
The once-celebrated Pasok, for instance, which led the government when the euro EURUSD, -0.16% crisis erupted in 2009, has seen its electoral support plunge from its zenith of 48% in 1981 to a paltry 4.7% in last month’s election.
The Spanish Socialist Party, which governed Spain for 14 years under Felipe Gonzalez, has seen its support fall from 48% in 1982 to just 22% in the most recent polls, putting it in third place behind Podemos, which is just one-year-old.
In France and Germany, the mainstream center-left parties have dropped any pretense of fighting the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominates EU economic policy and have been punished by voters accordingly.
French Socialist President François Hollande, who swept into office with a parliamentary majority in 2012 on pledges that he would fight German-imposed austerity, saw his approval ratings plummet below 20% when he failed to deliver on that promise.
Germany’s Social Democrats, too timid to resist the popularity of conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, have not only been co-opted into her stringent view of European economic policy but into most every aspect of domestic policy as part of a coalition government.
