All anti-neo-liberal now? The Party of European Socialists, European Greens and European Left Party respond to the crisis1 Luke March University of Edinburgh
[email protected] Paper for PSA 2013 Draft version 1.0. Work very much in progress. Please do not quote without author’s permission. Why has the left failed to benefit from the post-2008 economic crisis? This is a common, but perhaps slightly unfair question. It is difficult to see any one political family as a unique beneficiary, and indeed the right’s apparent earlier ideological hegemony has become unstuck with the ‘austerity medicine’ having consistently failed to revive the European patient. Nevertheless, there is still something remarkable about socio-economic conditions that should be a ‘perfect storm’ for left-wing politics regularly failing to produce anything like a clear boon for the left. The February 2013 Italian elections are just the latest that may mark a ‘no- confidence’ vote in the Centre-Left (McDonnell and Bobba 2013). The social democratic Democratic Party (PD) and its more leftist ally, the post-communist Left Ecology Freedom threw away an apparently unassailable lead to squeak ahead of the right and Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement. This paper aims to contribute to answering this overarching question by comparing the policy and ideological response to the crisis undertaken by the three ‘left’ transnational party federations (TNPs) at European level, the Party of European Socialists (PES), European Green Party (EGP) and European Left Party (EL).2 Comparing the three TNPs is an apposite approach. Although TNPs are ‘timidly rising actors’, relatively weak formations that fall far short of being fully integrated parties, they at the very least aspire to a minimal level of ideological and policy co-ordination (Bardi 2004; cf.