Why the left failed

Emmanuel Macron’s messy second term looks increasingly likely to give way to a Marine Le Pen presidency. Keir Starmer’s over-caution sees Reform tied with or leading Labour in an increasing number of polls.

Trump and his allies have come into power as an anti-establishment force. That they can do so despite the fact that many of their key tribunes are billionaires indicates how talented their propagandists are. 

To stop what looks like an inevitable slide towards populism, progressives need a strategy to confront the narratives of the far right, alongside an economic programme that can deliver rising living standards. In an era of relatively low growth and impending climate crisis, the solutions will seem radical. 

But the uncomfortable starting point is this – the left is a mess. In the UK, its institutions have been hammered by the era of neoliberal hegemony, and all of the social, political and economic consequences that flow from it. There are about as many trade union members now as there were at the outbreak of the second world war, when the population was just over half its current size. 

With their support strongest among younger voters in urban areas, left wing electoral breakaways are heavily disadvantaged by first-past-the-post electoral systems. On the other hand, when working inside major parties, projects like Corbynism have to be built under siege from the media and the political establishment. 

But to rise to the challenge of this moment, the left must drop its instinctive sense of victimhood and address the fact that, despite mass discontent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, its electoral movements have ended in failure, or stagnation. Corbynism has been scattered to the winds. The American left has been in decline since Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic nomination. 

In Germany, if Die Linke gets back into the Bundestag later this month, it will be by the skin of its teeth. In Greece, Syriza has been in terminal decline for almost a decade. By creating a broad electoral coalition, the French left has done better, but Jean-Luc Mélenchon is still unlikely to make the second round of the next presidential election. 

Corbynism failed in large part because it was geared towards displacing the centre rather than defeating the nationalist right. The formative experiences of its activists and leaders came when they organised against Cameron and Clegg on austerity, and against Tony Blair over the Iraq War. The project’s mission was to reinstate social democracy in the political mainstream after decades in the wilderness. But on Brexit it was blindsided. 

When a date for the EU referendum was called in early 2016, I was Momentum’s national treasurer and an organiser for the left wing anti-Brexit group Another Europe is Possible. I spent much of the spring trying to shake the newly resurgent Labour left into action. The overwhelming response was indifference. 

The reason for this was not some secret “Lexit” plot among Corbyn and his advisers – however appealing some may find this explanation – but ideological confusion. Those running Corbyn’s operation failed to see that, on the other side of the centre’s collapse, the nationalist right was preparing its own shock that was perfectly calibrated to destroy the insurgent left. As the Brexit project inevitably unravelled in the years following the referendum, Labour seemed determined to avoid taking a clear position. 

When Labour finally shifted towards a clearer policy, it did so at the end of a series of shambolic handbrake turns. As the 2017 general election showed, Corbynism could make advances against the Tories of the austerity era, as it did against David Cameron and Theresa May. But against the Brexit Toryism of Boris Johnson, it was shipwrecked. 

To win against the nationalist right, then and now, the left needs to defeat the ideological content of the Brexit project and offer a sharp, insurgent alternative rooted in class politics. Yet in the UK and across Europe, sections of the left are still falling into the trap that has been laid for them. 

In early February, Dan Carden, a left wing Labour MP, was unveiled as the chair of a renewed Blue Labour grouping in the parliamentary Labour Party, which will be campaigning to cut immigration. He says that he does not mind being labelled “socially conservative”. 

In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht has provided the clearest illustration of the left-wing, socially conservative model. Created as a split from Die Linke, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW), is standing in this month’s federal elections on a platform of outright hostility to immigration, support for traditionalist social values, and withdrawal of military support for Ukraine, as well as some social democratic economic reforms. 

Wagenknecht, alongside more maverick figures such as George Galloway, is the standard-bearer for a left wing transformation that runs much deeper than electoral tactics. It sees capital as international, but working class interests as rooted in the nation and in tradition. 

This perspective is influenced ideologically by the unreconstructed end of the communist tradition. The Greek Communist Party (KKE), for instance, has long combined strong leftist economic policies with socially conservative views, including opposition to gay marriage. 

Until a few years ago, it was common for liberal pro-Europeans to believe that the centre was the natural home of progressivism, with populists intruding at either end of the spectrum. As Another Europe is Possible pointed out throughout the Brexit period, this was an illusion. 

The national populism of Sahra Wagenknecht finds an echo in the Danish Social Democrats, led by Mette Frederiksen, who have pursued offshore detention for asylum seekers and pushed the EU to adopt ever-tougher border controls. 

Emmanuel Macron has relied on the support of Rassemblement National to pass hardline immigration laws. Donald Tusk, the centrist Polish Prime Minister, has exempted border guards from criminal liability if they shoot people at the border, while those distributing food to migrants face prosecution. 

And now, Starmer’s Labour appears set on copying the Conservatives’ performatively cruel approach to immigration, publishing videos of deportations. In a straightforward breach of Britain’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, the Starmer government will criminalise people arriving irregularly, and ban them from ever becoming British citizens.

The direction of travel is far from one-way. Mélenchon once positioned himself as a strong Eurosceptic, and has been critical of free movement. However, as the electoral alliance behind him has widened and developed roots in recent years, “Frexit” is no longer a prospect and his party, La France Insoumise, has taken a more consistent position in favour of migrants’ rights.

As the far right takes power in the United States and spreads across the continent, the choice facing the left – on borders, human rights and internationalism – will continue to sharpen. There was once a time when such debates could be shrugged off. Now, they may well shape Europe’s future. 

Michael Chessum is a journalist and activist who is the author of This is Only the Beginning: The Making of a New Left