Diverging Trajectories of the European Left
Are left-wing parties in Europe advancing, retreating, or holding steady? Turns out it’s a mixed bag — here’s what I found when I looked at different parties’ electoral performance since 1992.
On this side of the Atlantic, it feels like the left is in a difficult spot. The motivation for this article was to see if that was the case in Europe, too. Has there been a general ebb in popular support for left-wing politics across the advanced capitalist world? My impression going in was that there had been such an ebb — thinking of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and Die Linke in Germany.
What I found surprised me a bit. There certainly was a post–2008 Global Financial Crisis ascent and fall pattern in many countries, particularly in Southern Europe plus Ireland which were hit hard by European Union–imposed austerity regimes. But there are also just as many countries where the electoral fortunes of the left seem to be holding steady and, on top of that, just as many where the trend seems to be headed up.
To be clear, I don’t mean to reduce the left’s success or failure to its electoral performance. Naturally there are many ways to measure the strength of a movement: its militancy, its victories, the growth in membership and unity of its organizations. But electoral strength — measured in terms of popular support and the percentage of the popular vote, not seats won — is certainly one reasonable measure of the popularity of socialist ideas. At least this is true in countries where the left has organized itself into political parties and where proportional representation (or other electoral arrangements which reduce the terribly distorting effects of winner-take-all elections) guarantees that all parties’ support in society will be registered roughly accurately.
As Frederick Engels once wrote, if nothing else elections are a useful “gauge” for the level of support for the socialist movement. And someday, “when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand.”
Evidence
The following graphs chart the trajectory of parties with roots in the socialist movement and which stand to the left of more mainstream social democracy. I look at elections in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
I excluded the smaller countries in Europe with about a million or fewer people as well as Switzerland for somewhat arbitrary reasons (my defense: the tiny countries are hard to follow, and Switzerland’s electoral system is peculiar). I also excluded the Eastern Bloc countries because they have a significantly distinct recent political history, and I excluded the UK (and other Anglosphere countries) because its winner-take-all system makes it much harder to say that elections there act as an adequate gauge of the left’s electoral strength.
Data is for elections to the lower legislative house (which I think serves as a better index of the strength of different political projects compared to executive elections and which is available in all the countries I look at here). I collected data on any party scoring 0.5% of the popular vote or more in each country (or which won at least one legislative seat). In countries where there is more than one “left party” the figure graphed is their cumulative strength.
Support as of March 2024 is based on the average of the five most recent national polls I found logged on Wikipedia, and is of course limited only to the parties which were included in the poll. I excluded green as well as nationalist parties with a left-wing tilt (Plaid Cymru in Wales, Sinn Fein in Ireland, various parties in Spain) since they are sufficiently distinct from parties with a socialist lineage to deserve a separate analysis. You can see a list of which parties I collected data for here.
In no particular order, we have:
The five countries of Southern Europe and Ireland. Here we see the rise and fall in Greece, Spain, and Portugal of a distinct left-wing political movement after the Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing European debt crisis (in the shaded region). There was also an uptick of support for the far left in Ireland, but it didn’t go as high as parties elsewhere so is overshadowed.
The five countries of “Western Europe” — Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, the European Union’s more affluent core. Earlier left-wing waves in Germany and the Netherlands crested before the Global Financial Crisis and have receded since. But France and Belgium are home to left-wing movements that have risen steadily since 2009, and in Austria the left has only really taken off since 2020.
Finally, the four Nordic countries. There’s no clear relationship between the left’s fortunes and the Global Financial Crisis. But Denmark and Norway are home to ascendant left party movements, while the left struggles more in Sweden and Finland — though there is some evidence of an uptick there as well.
The table below summarizes the results. From top to bottom, countries are grouped by row according to whether the left’s trajectory appears to be rising, holding steady, or falling. Columns note the left’s peak as a percentage of the popular vote since 1992.
Countries in the first column have lefts that since the end of the Cold War have been fairly weak electorally, whereas countries in the third column have lefts that at least at some point since 1992 have won the support of at least one in five citizens participating in national elections. Thus Austria’s electoral left is small but ascendant. France and Denmark’s are large and growing (though troubles holding together Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s NUPES coalition might cut this short). And Greece and Spain’s left parties were quite strong in recent memory but are now falling.
Caveats
Separate articles are needed on the post–Cold War electoral fortunes of the left in the Anglosphere, the former Eastern Bloc countries, and of course in Latin America, where strong left parties continue to stoke a second Pink Tide. I promise to do those soon. I would love to know more about the left’s trajectories in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but I don’t have the background knowledge to do that properly at the moment so I would be interested in articles readers might have to share on those regions. Please drop links in the comments below.
All the data collected for this project were taken from Wikipedia. The wonderful volunteer researchers at Wikipedia have created the most accessible and rich source for electoral data that I know of. However, if they transcribed some data wrong… blame them, not me. This is a blog, not a journal of rigorous study. If I in turn copied any data wrong myself I accept responsibility on that count.
There are some small methodological choices I decided not to describe here (for example, how to count the popular support of the Workers’ Party of Belgium in recent polls, which is complicated because polling I found is done by region rather than nationally), but I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments or in private.