Europe Finds Comfort in Turn to Left

LONDON — Eight years after the end of the Cold War, leaning to the left is once again fashionable among voters in Europe, where socialism was born and cradle-to-grave government welfare programs are everybody’s birthright.

France has now joined a turn-of-the-century electoral trend shifting the political center of gravity markedly to the left in both Western and Eastern Europe. Socialist parties now rule or share government in 13 of the 15 nations of the European Union.

Common denominators are elusive when “socialist” describes both of the latest two arrivals to power: unreconstructed tax-and-spender Lionel Jospin of France and Britain’s Tony Blair, a centrist free marketeer.

Still, what unites the West European left is a historical humanist commitment to state-funded social welfare and, in most places, a profound distrust of U.S.-style turbo capitalism.

“Europe is having a hard time accepting the 1980s trend of economic liberalization embodied by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,” said British analyst Philip Gordon. “People are wedded to the welfare state and reluctant to go any further.”

As the European Union presses toward establishment of a controversial common currency, leftist governments rule alone in six key states: France, Britain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Sweden.

In four others, they head a center-left coalition: Holland, Denmark, Austria and Finland. In three, they are junior partners in a governing coalition: Ireland, Luxembourg and Belgium.

The leftist tide is mirrored in Eastern Europe, where, in second-round after-the-Berlin-Wall elections, Socialists or former Communists have been elected in countries such as Poland, Slovenia, Hungary and Lithuania.

In the rich West today, Socialists and leftist allies are in opposition in only two EU member countries--Germany and Spain. In Spain, conservatives ousted entrenched but scandal-stained Socialists in elections last year. In Germany, Socialists could win elections scheduled for 1998, returning to power for the first time since 1982.

“It looks as if the conservative era is coming to an end,” Eckhard Schulte, a Frankfurt economist, said Monday.

What is sometimes easy to overlook from the American perspective is that socialism, and the state welfare obligations it imposes, is a hallowed, deep-rooted tradition across Europe.

In both Germany and Spain, for example, conservative parties govern to the left of the Clinton administration, just as Conservative John Major did in Britain before his defeat last month. Germany’s welfare state, in fact, was established by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic Union after World War II.

Today, on a continent where ideology no longer engenders fear or dictates policies, voters now march to the drums of social concern much in the same way as do Americans. “What people are demanding are more and better public services, with job creation No. 1, and public health systems and education also near the top of the agenda,” said Adam Steinhouse at the London School of Economics.

Now that the historic suspicion of socialism and communism as a threat to political and economic freedom has ended, voters everywhere focus foremost on down-home issues: Lifelong free health service, education, pensions and government-stoked employment opportunities. All come with citizenship across Europe, and everyone is loath to lose them.

As in Italy, in many cases a Socialist vote is essentially a conservative vote--a bid to conserve safety-net programs that seem endangered by rapid free market modernization, said Italian analyst Franco Pavoncello in Rome.

“People get scared, and they want reassurance that all social nets won’t be taken away. There is a tendency to look back at the left and to seek in leftist governments a guarantee that changes are not going to damage social networks,” Pavoncello said.

In a number of countries today, pragmatic Socialist governments espouse free market economic reforms without deafening opposition because they do not simultaneously challenge social welfare policies.

In Britain, Blair came to power by building a “New Labor” and forging unprecedented support as candidate of the “radical center.”

In the gaze of some British commentators, though, Jospin learned nothing from Blair’s transformation of Labor.

While Blair promised almost nothing and promised not to rock the British boat, Jospin says he will create 700,000 jobs, cut the average work week without loss of pay and reduce taxes.

“It is the economics of a madhouse. When he fails to deliver--as inevitably he will--French politics will enter a dangerous new phase,” said British commentator Andrew Neil.