Opposing Neo-liberal Europe? The Left TNPs and their Groups in the European Parliament1 Luke March University of Edinburgh
[email protected] EUSA Conference, Boston, March 2015 Work in progress. Please do not quote without author’s permission. Why has the left failed to benefit from the post-2008 economic crisis? This has been a common refrain in recent years, but is perhaps an 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 increasingly unstuck with the ‘austerity medicine’ having consistently failed to revive the European patient in the manner and time-scale promised. Nevertheless, the victory of the radical left Syriza party in the February 2015 elections remains very much exceptional, and in the short term is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere in Europe (except perhaps Spain). So, it is still remarkable that socio-economic conditions providing a ‘perfect storm’ for left-wing politics have regularly failed to produce anything like a clear boon for the left. 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.