Europe’s Limp Left

Viktor Orbán’s vanquishing in Hungary’s April election was, on paper at least, the kind of moment that once nourished Europe’s left. After sixteen-years of calcified nationalism, prolonged democratic erosion and Hungary’s suffocation beneath the dense smog of permanent culture war, one might have expected the floodgates to buckle for a great socialist or labour revival; a broad, popular movement surging through the opening, wiping out Orbán’s Fidesz and ushering in a fresh progressive current from Szombathely to Nyíregyháza. Yet one would be wrong.

Orbán was dispensed of not by a resurgent left, but by Péter Magyar’s Tisza; a rigidly centre-right challenger, and hence one suitably draped in the linguistic vestments of populism, anti-corruption and national renewal. Tisza’s victory ceased Orbán’s decade-and-a-half reign and secured Magyar a parliamentary supermajority, but it marked not the jubilant return of a mass democratic left in the European modo of old. Instead, Tisza appears set to simply revamp Hungary’s right into a less authoritarian, and therefore more palatable, form.

Such an overwhelming electoral outcome would have, in years past, represented the rejection of party and ideology both. So why is it that in Hungary, following sixteen-years of nationalist rule and patronage politics, the force most aptly placed to inherit the future is not socialism or social democracy, but a rival conservative faction simply promising more transparent management? Orbánism was quashed, but Hungary's right did more than endure. It thrived.

Hungary is, of course, an extreme case. Yet it is not an isolated one. Across the continent, the right has not only survived, but prospered; expanding, adapting and insinuating itself into ordinary government. A litany of states, encompassing Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Sweden, Croatia and the Netherlands have witnessed hard-right forces shape their governments, while in Britain, France, Germany and Spain, right-wing populist sentiment has become a poll-dominating pressure upon mainstream politics. 

The European Union’s Hemicycle, has, since 2024, featured not only a significant left-wing deficiency, but a markedly more porous boundary between the centre-right and far-right as cross-party cooperation has flourished. It seems readily apparent that a branch of politics once deemed untouchable now exists as another simple rung on the ladder to power. 

Despite a smattering of left-wing victories in recent years partially damming Europe’s right-wing cascade, how often are these (often marginal) triumphs celebrated simply because they have beaten the hordes of hard-right politics into a secondary position, rather than because they evidence a striking desire among the electorate for a new wave of liberal policies? Mass left victories have increasingly become a spectacle of the past.

Now, despite the natural inclination one might have to explain this continental shift in terms of ideological absence (Europe no longer wants the left), in truth, such a précis is both too neat and demonstrably false in equal measure. Rather, European electorates have not suddenly (nor inexplicably) cosied up to privatised utilities and widening inequality, nor have they developed a pronounced infatuation with low wages and landlordism. On the contrary; voters have continued to champion a tapestry of policies typically associated with the left throughout Europe’s rightwards drift.

Public ownership of utilities, increases in minimum wages and wealth taxation continue to enjoy great significance as voting-determinants of Europe’s electorate. Even in ostensibly conservative electorates does the vast majority display a marked favouring of wealth redistribution and state intervention to reduce income gaps. 

It is then clear that Europe’s left suffers, not from an ideological drought, but from a pronounced organisational deficiency; a curious development, considering that reactionary and pro-capitalist movements have historically served as one of the left’s great mobilising engines. Léon Blum’s Popular Front successfully combatted France’s fascists leagues in the 1930s, while Franco’s military revolt was met by thousands of anti-fascist volunteers from throughout the continent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. The authoritarian right has long represented, not only the left’s most ferocious ideological opponent, but simultaneously its furnace. Fascism, strike-breaking, oligarchy and anti-unionism forged the bedrock of labour militancy and socialist solidarity throughout the 20th century.

Yet the modern left has dropped ideologically rigidity in favour of a misguided rebrand which portrays the bloc as simply a softer governing alternative. This organisational deficiency is perhaps best evidenced by the disastrous laissez faire approach of the modern European left to recruitment. When was the last time a left-wing party campaigned on the basis of their ideological merit? Germany’s Social Democrats routinely rally citizens to lend their vote in order to halt the AfD, the British Greens employ similar tactics against their right-wing counterpart, Reform, and the European Union appears more poised to restrict cashflow to renegade populist states than it desires advancing political pluralism to stem the cause of populist growth in the first case.

But then the world has, of course, thinned. Europe’s deindustrialisation witnessed a marked decline in trade union density, while the professionalisation of party politics and the ever-widening cultural estrangement between progressive-elites and working-class communities (a British Labour MP is likely to feel closer to home in a metropolitan bar than a Northern pub, you see) has left Europe’s left organisationally exposed. Yet the left remains barbed; it can diagnose the root inequality with an academic precision, produce manifestos with avid technocratic promise and distill a remarkably pure strand of moral outrage towards the far-right. Its struggle however, lies in converting such outrage into ideological allegiance.

Migration represents the starkest example of the left’s failure to accrue ideological support. Objectivity aside, for many working-class voters, the issue of migration is innately bound to inadequate wages, housing shortages and faltering public services. Yet the left frequently deems it pertinent to speak of migration through a vitriolic mix of managerial inevitability and moral reprimand; a disastrous strategy that has, for years, allowed the populist right to pose as the only force willing to acknowledge genuine working-class anxieties. The speed with which Europe’s left could cast aside the continent’s right-populist sects, were it to engage the masses on migration, in good faith, cannot be understated. But it won’t, you can be certain of that.

Perhaps this explains why the left’s lesser evil strategy now yields ever-diminishing returns. The far-right’s surge may provoke fear from swathes of European voters, but fear does not build loyalty alone. People can be shocked into voting against a movement, but they cannot be scolded into belonging to a separate movement entirely; besides, shock wears off, and once mass right-wing populism becomes a continental norm (if trends continue) what will be left for the left to appeal to once voters’ shock and fear has dissipated? 

The task for Europe’s left is not to mimic the far-right’s cruelty, nor to repackage its prejudices in a pretty red rosette; it is to recover the social vocabulary of protection. When the working-class derives anxiety from migration, housing, wages and national cohesion, the left en masse must cease to treat such concerns as unfortunate moral defects, and instead as the raw material of politics. A serious left would seek to answer insecurity with unionised labour markets, housing concerns with (and it seems obvious) mass housebuilding, stronger commitments to emboldening public services and enacting democratic control over social change.

Yet such an endeavour, and the quest to snatch power from the opportunistic jaws of Europe’s populist cadres, requires more than clever messaging, but the rebuilding of the seamless organisational machinery of which the left was once renowned.

Hungary’s lesson possesses a potentially prophetic nature; even the fall of Europe’s emblematic illiberal did not produce a left-wing dawn. Crises do not organise themselves, and the electorate’s rejection of one right-wing authoritarian by no means guarantees their automatic replacement with a new liberal order. Unless Europe’s left rebuilds the institutions capable of converting discontent into collective power, and engaging its core-voters on the issues most pressing to them, the continent will be subjected to a purgatorial cycle of right-wing Ouroboros, whereby the old-right collapses, the new-right inherits, and the people the left claims to champion continue their quest for representation elsewhere.

Image: Flickr/Kalboz

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