Why copying the populist right isn’t

oing to save the left
Social democratic parties have been losing ground for more than two
decades but pandering to rightwing anxieties about immigration is not
the solution.
By Cas Mudde
Main image: Illustration: Getty/Rex/Guardian Design

A
Tue 14 May 2019 06.00 BST

mong the old stalwarts of the centre-left, there is a simple explanation for the
decline of the parties they used to lead: immigration. In recent interviews with the
Guardian, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and the former Italian prime minister Matteo
Renzi all sounded the same note, declaring that Europe must “get a handle on
migration” to stop rightwing populism. Hardly a week passes without some
candidate or columnist declaring that liberals will only regain power when they
lock down the borders.

The obsession with immigration is not an accident. It reflects a widely held belief that the decline
of the grand parties of the centre-left across Europe – the Socialist party (PS) in France, the
Democratic party (PD) in Italy, the Social Democratic party (SPD) in Germany – has been caused by
the rise of the new parties of the populist radical right, who have “stolen” the old working-class
vote with a nativist, even authoritarian, message. Consequently, centre-left politicians have been
scrambling to come up with policies to “win back” the working class. (Blair was already worrying
about this in 2001, according to his former EU adviser Stephen Wall, who recalled the prime
minister saying: “The one thing that could lose me the next election is immigration.”)

This view is hardly confined to Clinton and Blair. In the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected
victory, many American liberals insisted that “winning back the rust belt” could only happen if
the Democrats embraced white fears about immigration. Indeed, Clinton herself had a long track
record of statements and Senate votes against “illegal” immigration and for “border security”
(including a “fence”), while prominent European social democrats have been calling for
“immigration realism” since the late 2000s.

But since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, these worries have escalated into a panic, as the
leaders of Europe’s social democratic parties scramble to show their concerns over immigration.
In the last year, the leader of Belgium’s Socialist party has issued the blanket declaration that
“migration to Europe must decrease”, while the new leader of Germany’s SPD has said that her
country “cannot accept all” asylum seekers that arrive at its borders. The Danish Social Democrats
have gone so far that their statements on immigration are hard to distinguish from the far-right
Danish People’s Party – accusing Muslims in Denmark of living in “parallel societies”, and arguing
that immigration “undermines” the Danish welfare state.

This dramatic shift in the rhetoric of ostensibly centre-left parties is part of a larger panic over
how to halt the spread of rightwing populism across the west in recent years. The conventional
wisdom has been largely steered by a growing group of academics and pundits, often of the right
or centre, who offer the same advice: social democratic parties will perish unless they take care of
the “left behind” voters by limiting immigration. Some academics now even go so far as to openly
defend white identity politics.

The argument that a tougher stand on immigration will revive the social democratic parties – and
arrest the rise of the radical right – is based on two basic errors, which together reflect a larger
misunderstanding about the historic role of centre-left parties.

The first mistake is the widespread assumption that the rise of rightwing populism and the
decline of traditional centre-left parties are two sides of the same coin – both caused by working-
class voters abandoning the old social democrats for the nativist message of the new populist
radical right. The second misperception, closely related to the first, is that the voters who now
support the populist radical right are largely the white working class that used to vote reliably for
social democratic parties.

As the data shows, both of these widely repeated assumptions stand on loose empirical footing.
In fact, most populist radical-right voters are not working class, and the majority of the working
class does not support the populist radical right.

These errors are based on a larger misunderstanding about the history of social democratic
parties. Social democracy is an ideology that supports egalitarianism and social justice through
the framework of liberal democracy and a mixed economy. Inspired by the Marxist concept of
class struggle, social democracy aims to uplift all marginalised groups. But those who argue that
centre-left parties need to pander to white anxiety about immigration are essentially saying that
social democratic parties are first and foremost an interest group for “the working class” – which
is always, in these accounts, assumed to be white.

This misdiagnosis of the decline of the centre-left – and the rise of the populist right – leads to the
wrong prescription for reviving social democracy. In fact, centre-left parties have been trying to
“act tough” on immigration for decades, and have often supported policies to limit immigration,
but it has not prevented their decline.

At least since the beginning of the new century, a debate has been raging about how to respond to
right-wing populism – largely between those who regard it as the byproduct of “economic
anxiety”, and those who see it as a form of cultural backlash. But both sides have the prescription
wrong: if social democracy is to survive, its politicians need to return to their core values – rather
than chasing a mirage that looks like their former core voters.

The key to reviving the fortunes of social democracy is not to pander to the nativism of part of the
white working class, but to embrace the ideas and policies that are fundamental to social
democracy – egalitarianism, social justice, solidarity, the right to social protection and a
comprehensive welfare state. These values represented a widely shared common sense for the
vast majority of Europeans in the second half of the 20th century – before their hegemony was
eroded by three decades of neoliberal ideas and policies. The only way back for social democracy
is to fight to make these values dominant once again.

A
t first sight, it makes sense to link the decline of social democratic parties to the rise
of populist radical-right parties. But correlation does not always equal causation.
First of all, they did not happen at the same time. More importantly, they have
separate causes.

If we look at the average vote share for social democratic parties in western Europe,
we can see that it rose to more than 30% in the 1950s and remained stable until the late 80s. In the
late 90s, the average vote share fell back to just under 30%, only to drop off sharply in the 2000s.
Today, it is slightly above 20%.

Until the beginning of the 1980s, populist radical right parties were largely irrelevant in western
Europe, polling at about 1%. By the 90s, this had increased slightly to about 5%. But, as the vote
share for social democratic parties fell in this decade, populist parties did not grow. In the 2000s,
they started to increase again, albeit modestly, averaging roughly 10% today.

These figures represent the average of votes across western Europe, but looking at specific
countries makes it even clearer that the rise of the populist radical right has not caused the
decline of social democratic parties. In many cases, the populist radical right has risen without
any comparable decline for the centre-left; in other cases, the centre-left parties began their sharp
decline long before there was any major populist radical right party.

In Switzerland, western Europe’s most successful populist radical-right party, the Swiss People’s
party, almost doubled its support between 1995 and 2015, from 14.9% to 29.4%, while the Social
Democratic party of Switzerland lost a mere 3% in that same period. The German SPD started its
decline after 1998, but took its biggest hit in 2009, four years before the populist radical-right
Alternative ür Deutschland (AfD) was even founded.

The Dutch Labour party (Partij van de Arbeid, or PvdA) took a hit from the rise of the rightwing
populist Pim Fortuyn List in 2002, but recovered well the next year. Its full implosion in 2017,
losing 19.1% (more than three-quarters of its 2002 total), was several years after the highpoint of
Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), in 2010. Moreover, the combined far right, ie the PVV and
the new Forum for Democracy (FvD), made only relatively moderate gains (+4.9%) in 2017. Not to
mention Spain’s Social Democratic party, who were almost halved before the recent rise of the
populist radical right Vox party, and actually achieved a significant victory, going from 22.6% to
28.7%, in the same election that Vox entered parliament with 10.3% of the vote.

There is a simple explanation for this. The decline of social democratic parties has largely
different causes from the rise of populist radical-right parties. First and foremost, the decline of
social democratic parties has mainly been caused by the transformation of an industry-based
economy into a service-based economy. This has led, among other things, to a sharp decline in
traditional working-class jobs and a relative decline of all working-class people within the broader
population.

Confronted with a declining working class and a growing middle class, social democratic parties
started to target the latter at the expense of the former. Inspired by Bill Clinton’s successful move
to the centre in the 1992 US presidential elections, Tony Blair rebranded the Labour party as New
Labour in 1994, and embraced a new “integration consensus” centred around cultural
(multiculturalism), economic (neoliberal globalisation) and national (EU) integration.

Moreover, he tried to “depoliticise” politics – claiming to propagate a new “pragmatic” approach

and “common sense” solutions, in which everyone was claimed to be a winner. Soon other
western European social democratic parties would follow, such as the Dutch PvdA and the
German SPD, whose leader Gerhard Schröder claimed to represent “the new centre” (“die neue
Mitte”). Slowly but steadily, even the the French socialists and the various southern European
parties followed suit.

European far-right leaders in Koblenz, Germany, from left: Matteo

Salvini (Lega), Frauke Petry (AfD), Geert Wilders (PVV) and Marine Le
Pen (National Rally). Photograph: Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

During the 1990s, the average vote share for social democratic parties only fell back a small
amount – but the populist radical right parties did not rise further at all. The big transformation
came only in the 2000s, most notably in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The political
framing of the “war on terror” helped to make cultural flashpoints like immigration, Islam and
security the predominant issues of the new century. In many western European countries, this
new political alignment – defined in cultural rather than economic terms – resulted in the Greens
becoming the main leftwing party, and the populist radical right becoming the main rightwing
party.

Leaders of the populist radical right like to be seen as the successors of the old social-democratic
“workers’ parties” – as the authentic representatives of “real working people”. For instance, the
former party leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, openly declared that “the AfD wants to become the
new SPD”. And the self-appointed far-right ambassador-at-large, the former Trump adviser Steve
Bannon, claims that “there’s an awful lot of guys on the [Bernie] Sanders side who are going to
come in and vote for us in 2020”.

But even this ambition involves a misleading assumption about the history of the working-class
vote. It is true that, since the second world war, the working class in western Europe has voted
disproportionately for social democratic parties, and communist parties where relevant – but a
significant part of the working class has always voted for rightwing parties.

ince the emergence of the populist radical right in the early 1980s, its voter base has continually
shifted and evolved – with white workers as an important but far from dominant component. The
few populist radical right parties of the 80s had small electorates, polling under 5%, and their
voters had a variety of class backgrounds and past voting behaviours. Parties such as the Belgian
S
Vlaams Bloc and the French Front National (FN) were particularly strong among the
self-employed, but also attracted both blue-collar and white-collar workers.
Unsurprisingly, given that populist radical-right parties declared themselves an
alternative to both left and right, they drew voters from both sides as well as picking
up some first-time and non-voters.

When some populist radical-right parties began to post better results in the 1990s – between 5%
and 15% of the vote – there was also a visible shift in the composition of their supporters. Those
parties held on to their predominantly middle-class supporters, but began to add significant votes
from among the working class. Hans-Georg Betz, one of the pioneers of the academic study of
populist radical-right parties, was the first person to note what he called the “proletarisation” of
the populist radical right.

The perception that the working class was shifting its allegiance to the populist radical right in the
late 1990s was further strengthened by a shift in their propaganda. Previously, many of these
parties had backed typically neoliberal policies such as lower taxes and privatisation, but now
they began to strongly support a chauvinist welfare state – one whose benefits would be robust,
but only for “our own people”.

As a consequence, the electorates of the more successful populist radical-right parties, like the
French FN and Austrian Freedom party, started to more closely resemble, in terms of class
structure, those of traditional socialist and social democratic parties in the 1990s. In both popular
and academic writings of the turn of the century, these successful populist radical-right parties
began to be called “workers’ parties” – because they were among the more popular parties with
the (white) working class. The stereotypical populist radical-right voter in western Europe was
now depicted as a young(ish), lower-educated, working class male.

But this was a misleading picture: young and working-class voters were indeed overrepresented
within the electorates of successful populist radical-right parties, compared with their
proportions in society as a whole – but they still constituted at best a plurality, not a majority,
among those parties’ electorates.

The chair of Germany’s SPD, Andrea Nahles, this month. Photograph:

Ronald Wittek/EPA

In fact, most voters for populist radical-right parties were not working-class – and most working-
class voters did not vote for the populist radical right. A recent study found that “only” 31% of
“production workers” and 23% of “service workers” voted for west European populist radical
right parties between 2000 and 2015. And while the FN and Austria’s Freedom party are
exceptions – with workers constituting 45% and 48% of their electorates, respectively – the
figures are much lower for other such parties, with Italy’s Lega Nord at only 17%, for example.

Furthermore, surveys show that populist radical right parties do not primarily take voters from
social democratic parties. And voters who abandon social democratic parties do not primarily
move to populist radical-right parties.

In the 2017 German parliamentary elections, the SPD, which slipped from 25.7% to 20.5%, lost
more voters to each of the other mainstream parties, and to non-voting, than to the AfD. And the
AfD, which entered the Bundestag for the first time with 94 seats (12.6% of the vote), won more
votes from Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union, as well as from non-voters
and “other parties” (notably the extreme right National Democratic party), than from the SPD.

A similar pattern could be seen in the Netherlands and Italy. The Dutch PvdA was wiped out in
2017, falling from 25% to 6% – but its former voters largely shifted to the green, radical left, and
social-liberal parties, rather than the populist radical right FvD and PVV. In Italy the following
year, Matteo Renzi’s Democratic party lost power – but almost none of its voters shifted to Matteo
Salvini’s Lega Nord, which mainly took votes from other rightwing parties and first-time voters.

What these examples demonstrate is that the recent growth of populist radical-right parties –
unlike their initial expansion in the 1990s – has not been driven by winning over more of the
working class. The real story is that responses to events such as 9/11 and the “refugee crisis” by
mainstream commentators and politicians brought the arguments of the populist radical right
more into the mainstream discussion – and their “solutions” consequently became acceptable to
broader sections of the public. As a result, the most successful populist radical-right parties now
are Volksparteien – “people’s parties”, rather than “workers’ parties” – and do not represent just
the working class.

T
his is not simply an academic debate. These misconceptions about populist radical-
right voters have had serious consequences for centre-left politics, because they
have led many social democratic parties to pursue failed strategies against the
populist radical right.

As it became clear that the “third way” had merely postponed the electoral decline of
social democratic parties, a search for alternatives began. But the overwhelming strategic focus
was on how to “win back” the “abandoned” (white) working-class vote.

This argument has been dominated by two rival camps – crudely, liberals against socialists. Each
camp has a different view of the main cause of the decline of social democratic parties and the
rise of the populist radical right, but they share the notion that “winning back the working class”
is the most important task.

One version of this debate took place in the US after Trump’s victory: did the (white) voters of
Michigan and Ohio defect to Trump because they were suffering financially (“economic anxiety”),
or was it for reasons of racial and ethnic supremacy (“cultural backlash”)?

Liberals tend to regard (white) working-class support for the populist radical right primarily in
terms of cultural backlash, although they do not deny that economics has played a role. This is
correct – as we shall soon see – but their responses have been ineffectual, often taking the form of
vague calls to “reclaim nationalism”, which almost always come down to tightening immigration.
While many liberals have been at the forefront of attacks on “populism” as today’s biggest threat
to democracy, many prominent liberals have implicitly accepted the framing of the populist
radical right. Sigmar Gabriel, who led Germany’s SPD for nearly a decade, declared in 2016 that
the lesson of Clinton’s loss to Trump was that “those who lose the support of workers in the rust
belt cannot be rescued by the hipsters of California”. This isn’t too far removed from the
simplistic populist dichotomy between “somewheres” and “anywheres” popularised by the
writer David Goodhart.

For liberals such as Tony Blair, whose eponymous Institute for Global Change has been at the
forefront of pushing a “progressive approach” to immigration, the populist backlash is not
because of neoliberal globalisation, and the massive economic inequality it created within
previously fairly equal societies in western Europe, but about “the things that people feel are
damaging about European immigration”.

It is a familiar story, shared by both social democrats and the populist radical right: social
democratic parties supported open borders against the wishes of “the people”, which usually
means the (implicitly white and nativist) working class. For decades populist radical right
politicians have claimed that social democratic parties have “betrayed” the white working class in
favour of immigrants and Muslims, their alleged new electorate. In reality, social democratic
parties have a much more complex relationship with immigration and multiculturalism.

Most social democratic parties were indeed vocal supporters of immigration and
multiculturalism, particularly during the 1980s and 90s. In many western European countries the
links between the parties and the anti-racist movement were tight – such as in France, where the
first president of SOS Racisme later became first secretary of the PS – and social democrats were at
the forefront of the political struggle against the far right.

But social democratic parties across western Europe were often less supportive in their actual
policies. They did not accept or acknowledge that their states had become “immigration
countries” like the US or Canada – and they implicitly or explicitly supported restrictions of both
economic immigration (for example, in the wake of the oil crisis of the early 1970s) and political
asylum (for instance in the wake of the Yugoslav civil war in the early 90s).

Similarly, their support for “multiculturalism” was mainly symbolic – as no party developed a
coherent policy, let alone a social democratic vision on multiculturalism. Blair’s own legacy is a
good case in point. As Will Sommerville of the Migration Policy Institute has argued, Blair and
New Labour expanded economic immigration but publicly championed a “stronger, more
restrictive approach to asylum and security”.

In many ways, Blair’s approach is illustrative of the confused way social democratic parties
responded to the increasing politicisation of immigration during the 1990s. With the third way no
longer arresting their electoral decline, centre-left parties joined the centre-right in a strategy of
co-optation – in other words, embracing the issues of the populist radical right in an attempt to
marginalise the parties espousing them. The call for “more realistic” immigration policies
increased in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as did calls for “tougher” integration policies
for (mostly) Muslim “immigrants. Just remember Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British
workers” speech in 2007, a clear dog-whistle to the populist radical right – the National Front had
campaigned with a similar slogan in the 1970s.
T
he left alternative to this faltering liberal approach has come from those who
commonly identify as “democratic socialists”. This camp has openly embraced the
idea of “left populism”, heavily influenced by Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political
theorist based in London, and her late husband, the Argentine Ernesto Laclau. They
are most famous for their critique of the third way aspirations to eliminate conflict
and partisanship from politics – and their call for a post-Marxist “radical democracy”
has influenced a whole generation of leftist academics and politicians, particularly in Latin
America and southern Europe.

Since Laclau’s death in 2014, Mouffe has become the most visible and vocal torchbearer of a new
left populism, most recently in her aptly titled book For a Left Populism. She uses the terms “left”
and “populism” very broadly, however, defining neither very clearly. Her key argument is that the
left must disrupt the neoliberal consensus by “repoliticising” politics – accepting that strife and
conflict between opposing groups are fundamental to political life. Unlike orthodox Marxists,
Mouffe argues this conflict should not unfold along traditional class fault lines – or any specific
fault lines at all. Instead, she argues that the left must unite around a deliberately vague anti-
establishment programme, designed to accommodate the broadest possible coalition of
progressive causes and grievances.

Mouffe and many other supporters of this left populist strategy saw the rise of a new progressive
dawn with the electoral success Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece a few years after the
economic crisis – she even published a book with one of the leaders of Podemos, Íñigo Errejón.
But since then, Syriza has broken the hearts of left populists across Europe, succumbing to EU
pressure, while Podemos has lost momentum as a consequence of personal and political conflicts.
Mouffe has now put her hope in Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French social democratic insider who
reinvented himself as a left populist outsider.

Íñigo Errejón, one of the leaders of Podemos, campaigning during

regional and European elections in Spain. Photograph: Victor
Lerena/EPA

Although Mouffe stays away from the nativism lite of some other left populists – most notably
Sahra Wagenknecht and her new movement Aufstehen (Stand Up) in Germany – she also clearly
targets the white working-class voters, particularly the ones the third way lost to the populist
radical right. In several interviews Mouffe has said: “When citizens go to vote they see no
difference between the choices facing them. That has allowed the development of right-
populism. Marine Le Pen speaks to the pain of the popular classes, telling them that foreigners are
the cause of their problems. We need another, opposed discourse built on the basis of equality.”
The left populists share the assumption that the (white) working class votes for the populist
radical right out of economic anxiety rather than cultural backlash. Hence, once the left provides
them with a better socio-economic alternative, they will no longer care about Islam and Muslims.

However, as the American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset demonstrated more than
60 years ago, some part of the working class is authoritarian and nativist. Decades of research
have since confirmed that these nativist working-class voters – like the other voters who support
the populist radical right – are first and foremost motivated by opposition to immigration (and
Islam). In other words, by cultural backlash rather than economic anxiety.

But while “liberal populists” like Blair or Clinton may have a better understanding of what drives
the voters of the populist radical right than the left populists, their proposed solution to the
problem has only helped make it worse. Academic research consistently shows that when
mainstream parties move to the right in an attempt to co-opt the issues of the radical right, it does
not hurt populist right parties – in fact, it often helps them. Moreover, other research shows that it
does not stop the electoral bleeding of social democratic parties either.

This makes perfect sense. By prioritising immigration as an issue – and reinforcing the negative
depiction of migrants and migration – mainstream parties only help to boost the main issue and
frame of the populist radical right. Moreover, populist radical right voters are not only nativist,
they are also populist, which explains why the “immigration realism” of social democratic parties
is ultimately not effective. Even when they go further than mere rhetorical support for tougher
immigration and integration policies, most (working-class) voters who oppose immigration and
believe it to be a salient topic also believe that mainstream parties in general, and the social
democratic party in particular, cannot be trusted. In fact, their rightward turn is taken as
confirmation that a vote for the populist radical right is the most effective choice, as it ensures
that other parties implement their policies.

T
o regain relevance in the 21st century, social democracy has to go beyond appeals to
populism – in both its liberal and left forms. The surprising successes of Jeremy
Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US have already shown that there is an
appetite for a revival of social democracy.

But before social democracy can be rejuvenated and made ready for the 21st century,
it has to come to terms with its own role within the political model the populist radical right now
so openly defends. While social democracy never openly defended white supremacy, its political
system, and welfare state, was built upon a social system that preferred white native workers over
non-white “guest workers” – and embraced the patriarchal dictates of single-income male-
dominated family life. While social democratic parties, and trade unions, were quick to appeal to
non-white workers, they did not fundamentally change their basic models.

Social democracy needs to reassert its ideals in a way that is inclusive of all workers. It should
return to the theory rather than the practice of European social democracy – an egalitarian
ideology based on solidarity with all socially weaker groups and individuals, irrespective of class,
race, or sexuality. In the early 21st century, throughout western Europe, a growing percentage of
the shrinking working class will be female and non-white (or of immigrant descent).

Moreover, by today’s standards, the traditional factory worker has a relatively privileged position,
a well-protected and well-rewarded permanent job. In a world of neoliberal globalisation, not
only are many of these classic working class positions outsourced to poorer countries, they are
replaced by precarious positions that lack protection and security. It is the great challenge of
social democracy in the 21st century to find a way to integrate the so-called “precariat” into a
broader movement for economic and social justice. Whether this can still be done under the
traditional header of “the working class” is of secondary concern. What is more important is that
the identity is built on socioeconomic interest rather than ethno-national identity.

It is important to stress that what we are facing at the moment is a crisis of social democratic
parties – not a crisis of social democratic ideals. It might seem delusional to make this claim at a
time of seemingly never-ending electoral defeats of social democratic parties, but social
democracy is alive and well. In fact, I cannot remember another period in my adult life where
there is such a vibrant debate on the future of social democracy. To be fair, this debate is,
ironically, almost exclusively in the US, and under the mostly erroneous term “democratic
socialism”, but it is raging, and not just in the traditional progressive “salons”.

Many traditional social democratic policies are supported by the majority of the populations in
Europe and North America. A recent OECD study, for example, found that a majority across all 21
member states support higher taxes for the rich to support the poor. More than half of the people
want their government to ensure better pensions (54%), while almost half feel the same with
regard to better healthcare (48%). More than one-third (37%) even support a guaranteed basic
income benefit.

And yet social democratic parties continue to lose electoral support, and the welfare state – an
institutional expression of many of these policies – is consistently dismantled. This is because
policies such as higher taxes for the rich and a strong welfare state are grounded in a social
democratic ideology, which has lost its ideological hegemony to neoliberalism since the 1980s.

Neoliberalism is not just an economic system, but also an ideology, which has fundamentally
transformed the way people see politics. In fact, one could argue that neoliberalism has been
more successful as an ideological project than an economic programme. Active citizens have
become passive customers, who consider the public sector an inefficient alternative to the private
sector – and regard competition, between firms or individuals, as the best model for an ideal
society.

Consequently, before there can be any electoral revival of social democratic parties, social
democrats need to challenge the assumptions of the neoliberal society, and re-establish their own
ideas of egalitarianism and solidarity as the new common sense. As the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci explained almost a century ago, political success can only come after cultural hegemony
is established. Only when people support the underlying values of social democracy can parties
successfully campaign on social democratic policies. Moreover, without broad support for key
social democratic values, even popular policies can easily be defeated.

The project of re-establishing the cultural hegemony of social democratic ideas is going to require
the mobilisation of people outside of the existing political parties, including the social democratic
ones. In most countries, these parties are anyway run by people who joined during the height of
the third way, which they erroneously consider to be the height of “real” social democracy.
Similarly, ideological rejuvenation should happen in collaboration with, but independent from,
Green and “radical left” parties, which have overlapping but fundamentally different ideological
projects.
The revival of social democracy will require a new cultural and political infrastructure, centred, at
first, outside of electoral politics. It should include the trade unions, which, despite weakened
membership and power, still have better connections to working people. It should include
progressive minority organisations, particularly those focused on socioeconomic concerns, and
new grassroots organisations, rooted in local communities.

In short, reviving social democracy will require a new social democratic movement – one that is
bigger, bolder and more energetic than the existing parties.

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