When the banking crisis broke in 2008 it brought forth a surge of simple-minded optimism on the political Left. The crisis in capital markets met by state action must lead to a resurgence for those parties which saw the need for a larger government role. This, it was said, was a Left moment.
In the event, that turned out to be close to the opposite of the truth. As David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary, points out in The Times today, parties from the Centre Right are now in power in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. This particular conjunction of events has not happened for almost a century.
The defeats have not been close, either. The Left has not won in France or Denmark for a decade. In Sweden, the Social Democrats had their worst result since 1921. In the Netherlands, they lost a tenth of their seats and, in Germany, the SPD suffered the biggest percentage loss of any party in 60 years of federal elections. In Italy, even Silvio Berlusconi is failing to rally support for the Left.
All countries are different and there are, of course, contingent national factors. Electorates tend to tire of parties after a long spell in power, especially when they offer an unpopular leader. But the change is notable. In 1999, 13 out of the 15 governments in the European Union came from the Left.
The demise of the Left is a matter both of its failures and of its success. The repeated success of parties of the Left throughout the 1990s eventually compelled a serious response from its opponents. Under Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Frederik Reinfeldt and David Cameron, parties of the Right shed their reputations as uncaring. A new generation of political leaders on the Right brought their parties back into the compassionate mainstream. They were, as a result, credible alternative governments-in-waiting when the failures in policy associated with left governments became manifest.
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All over Europe, the political Left has become associated with generous welfare states and an unpopular liberalism towards immigration. But, more than anything else, the Left has been punished because the economy broke on its watch and because electorates consider its propensity towards public spending too great an economic risk in straitened times. This is a deeper hole than most left-of-centre politicians, certainly, in Britain, yet seem to understand.
Stuck in the comfortable position of critic, not many politicians on the Left are doing any sophisticated thinking. They will need a much more convincing story than they are yet telling about wealth creation, reform of the public sector and welfare dependency. Their test, as the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, argued in a thoughtful speech last week, is “not whether we attend enough demonstrations” but “whether we can start to demonstrate anew that we are a credible alternative”.
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, once defined the 1990s as the nice decade: non-inflationary continuous expansion. If it is true, as Mr Miliband suggests, that the nice decade has given way to the grim decade — growth reduced and inflationary misery — then the task for the Left is both obvious and difficult: to redefine social democracy to make it less dependent on the unbounded generosity of taxpayers.