This has been a year of realignment in European politics. The remarkable point is not a shift from left to right, but rather the triumph of the center. If Persson’s Social Democrats look to be coasting to victory in Sweden’s Sept. 15 elections, it’s because they’ve cornered the center. If Schroder, a week later, finds himself and the SPD in electoral hot water, it will be because he yielded the moderate middle to Edmund Stoiber’s Christian Democrats. (If Schroder wins, so goes the joke across Europe, it will be because of an act of God–the tragic flooding that would benefit any politically savvy incumbent.) In the new political order, dogma and ideology have little sway. Pragmatism rules. “Parties that can adapt are successful,” says Robert Taylor of the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. “Parties that are prisoners of their own history are not.”
Extremism and eccentricity have no place in the new political order. Slovakia’s elections on Sept. 21 have not garnered much media attention, but NATO and the European Union are keenly interested: if the unpalatably extreme former prime minister Vladimir Meciar manages to reclaim his office, Slovakia will be unwelcome in either organization. NATO and the EU will pay similar heed to who wins Macedonia’s Sept. 15 elections. In Holland, the electoral success in May of the fringe party of the assassinated Pim Fortuyn looked like a victory for a party not of the center. But since then the faction has all but fallen apart in internecine fighting.
In this electoral season, most eyes are understandably on Germany, Europe’s biggest economy. But it is Sweden, with a population barely the size of London’s, that is the model–once again. In the 1930s an American journalist named Marquis Childs wrote “Sweden: The Middle Way,” which celebrated Sweden as a hopeful compromise between capitalism and communism. In the Americas and Europe in the 1990s, the “middle way” was reincarnated as the now much-maligned Third Way. Under its umbrella, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and others charted a course between hardhearted Thatcherite capitalism and budget-busting, inefficient socialism.
Today, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, which has ruled for all but nine of the past 70 years, is far and away the world’s most successful democratic political party. This is due partly to Sweden’s remarkable political and economic stability over a turbulent century. But it’s also because the SDP, though leaning clearly to the left, has been highly adaptable–and virtually dogma-free. To outsiders, Sweden may seem the embodiment of the welfare state. But it never nationalized industries, for example, nor felt threatened by free-market economics. It was among the first European nations to deregulate its credit and currency markets in the ’90s (in Europe, only Britain’s are more liberal) and reform its tax code (corporate taxes are low, 30 percent, even if personal taxes are high at 55 percent). “To change and modernize is not something we do once a generation,” says Swedish Trade Minister Leif Pagrotsky. “We do it all the time–with our eyes always on the horizon.”
By comparison, Germany’s SPD is clunkingly old-fashioned. The great failure of the SPD has been that it never matches “modernizing rhetoric with party reform,” says Mark Leonard of London’s Foreign Policy Center. Unlike the SDP in Sweden or, to a lesser extent, the Labour Party in Britain, the German Social Democrats have never come to terms with their recalcitrant, sometimes reactionary, union backers. As a result the German SPD lacks both coherence and conviction–not unlike the dysfunctional French Socialists. Everything becomes a muddle.
Small wonder the latest polls show Germans evenly divided between Schroder’s socialists and Stoiber’s conservatives. Ironically, both parties are so utterly of the center that scarcely an ideological hairbreadth divides them. Therein, also, lies the rub. Having failed to modernize either themselves or their platform, neither party seems particularly well positioned to handle the country’s deepening problems.
