The European Left Alliance: New Project, Old Problems?
One could be forgiven for having missed the creation of the European Left Alliance (ELA) late last year. Comprised of six parties (La France Insoumise, Podemos, the Portuguese Left Bloc, the Finnish Left Alliance, the Swedish Left Party, and the Danish Green-Left Alliance), ELA will now be the second Europarty of the radical Left aside from the existing European Left Party (EL) founded in 2004.
The creation of a separate party with a nearly identical name was justified by one of its leading figures, Manon Aubry, as needing “a party that’s more agile, dynamic, and representative of the new left-wing movements across the EU”. What that would actually mean in terms of programme, strategy, tactics and orientation remains a question mark. As Janis Ehling from Die Linke pointed out, “in terms of content, it is hardly distinct from the EL programme, offering no more than a series of very succinct statements and declarations of belief in peace”.
This new split on the Left may come as a surprise, but is in fact the culmination of a longer process of divergence that dates back at least to the 2015–2016 period, which saw important realignments on the European Left in the aftermath of the Syriza government’s capitulation to the Troika. That capitulation proved the structural limitations of a reformist approach towards the EU, centred on top-down negotiations and compromise rather than (also) mass mobilization and confrontation. In its wake, new transnational initiatives emerged that adopted a more combative stance towards the EU, such as Yanis Varoufakis’s Democracy in Europe (DiEM25) or Plan B for Europe. In effect, Plan B — rebranded as “Now, the People!” in 2019 — is by and large composed of the same parties that are now part of the ELA.
Hence, the emergence of the ELA amounts, for now, to little more than the organizational formalization of a pre-existing convergence of forces. Neither is this necessarily a weakening of the EU-wide radical Left as a whole — provided, of course, that is not marred by the kind of sectarianism that has plagued the Left so many times in its history, the establishment of another Europarty of the radical left could in fact offer a new impetus to this political family. When fundamental differences do in fact exist, organizational unity at all costs is neither productive nor sustainable over the long term.
The radical Left’s group in the European Parliament before 1989, Communist and Allies, was notorious for the paralysing effects of the deep internal cleavages between its Eurocommunist and Moscow-aligned factions. Those cleavages, however, were rooted in fundamentally different approaches to a number of crucial political questions, from European integration to transnational cooperation and the strategic road to socialism. It is less certain what fundamental differences there are between the EL and the ELA.
The latter has not yet said or done anything particularly distinctive. Even the “disobedient Euroscepticism” of its earlier incarnations appears to have been sidelined — especially amongst the Nordic member parties — in favour of pretty much the same kind of constructive criticism of the EU also practiced by the EL. Thus, so far, it seems the creation of the ELA only adds to a wider chronic problem on the radical Left: a level of organizational fragmentation that is not really justified by the level of political differences between various groups and initiatives.
The Lost Decade
Yet the fact that the creation of the ELA would probably be news to most left-wing activists across the continent even six months later points to an arguably bigger problem than this fragmentation, one that has more to do with the kind of programme, strategy, and methods that characterize the contemporary radical Left more than with any specific differences over how to tackle the embedded neoliberalism of the European project. The ELA’s founding manifesto is too brief and generic to indicate how this renewed effort at left-wing transnational cooperation might be able to address these problems, rooted as they are in the missed opportunities of the 2010s.
As I show in my book about transnational party cooperation during the Eurozone crisis, Europe’s radical Left failed to capitalize upon the opportunities presented by that crisis to boost its EU-wide coordination, cooperation, and cohesion. Despite facing the transnational imposition of austerity across the Southern periphery and beyond, left-wing parties failed to develop a transnational united front against it and the EU’s wider neoliberal architecture. Even the more practical diffusion of tactics and methods was rather limited. These were, after all, parties with a wealth of experience in organizing at the grassroots level, working effectively with social movements, and, at the same time, making significant electoral gains. Nevertheless, this experience was not translated into the practice of internationalism.
While parties like Syriza, Podemos, and the Portuguese Left Bloc did step up their cooperation, they mostly did so when the former became an electoral success story to boost the other parties’ profile in their own domestic political arenas. Most salient instances of transnational cooperation occurred during national electoral campaigns — perhaps necessary, but hardly sufficient. The more important need to tighten policy and strategic coordination at EU level played a secondary role at best. Due to this electoralist mindset, for which internationalism was worthwhile largely to the extent that it could increase the parties’ electoral fortunes, the “national” remained dominant within the “transnational” throughout the 2010s.
This is somewhat understandable given the limited power the radical Left has over the European institutions and their policymaking mechanisms. The Left has a better chance of affecting things at national and, even more so, local levels. But it also betrays a narrow understanding of politics that remains overwhelmingly focused on state institutions.
As a result, transnational cooperation remained limited to networking among party leaders and under-the-radar joint work in the European Parliament — an important arena of struggle, no doubt, but also the least relevant institution of the transnational Leviathan against which the radical Left was facing off. Worse still, the Left failed to make use of this institution in the most fruitful way it could have done so: as a platform to formulate and agitate around radical demands, to publicize, galvanize, and help coordinate extra-parliamentary movements and struggles. Instead, the parties represented in the European Parliament focused on largely futile parliamentary proceeding that generally have little to no impact on the balance of class forces at either transnational or national levels. To understand this failure, however, we need to dig deeper.
While not a particularly new phenomenon or uniquely characteristic of the radical Left, the increase in electoral fortunes experienced by parties like Syriza or Podemos in the early-to-mid 2010s saw them shift, in their domestic arenas, from a strategy of social mobilization and grassroots organizing to one that increasingly privileged electoral and parliamentary politics. Podemos’s position during the 2017 mass movement for independence in Catalonia, namely that the movement should back off and follow the constitutional path to a referendum, is paradigmatic of this shift. Even Syriza’s referendum in July 2015 was an electoralist manoeuvre to gain more leverage in the negotiations with the Troika rather than a tactical choice embedded in a wider strategy of mass-based confrontation.
This adaptation to and prioritization of parliamentary politics was not an accident or some naïve strategic blunder, but a natural outgrowth of a fundamentally reformist outlook, whereby parties otherwise (self-)described as radical Left see the institutions of liberal democracy as the main avenue for social change. That is ultimately why internationalism was subordinated to the demands of domestic politics and relegated to a largely performative function rather than as a key component of a strategy to fight and win.
Transcending False Dichotomies
This flawed approach to transnational cooperation and politics more generally rests upon two false dichotomies, equally perilous for the Left’s odds to take on the neoliberal status quo successfully. The first one is that between national and transnational politics. As one of the party leaders I interviewed for my book put it bluntly, “we don’t live on international cooperation here, we live from the approval of our people”. However, given the level of economic and political integration in the EU, one cannot shape national politics in any meaningful way without doing so at the transnational level and vice-versa. If the radical Left of the previous decade ultimately failed to significantly alter the neoliberal order in its own countries, it was also because it failed to do so at the EU level. Syriza might have had better chances to avoid capitulation if backed by a Europe-wide campaign of mass mobilization and disobedience. For that to happen, however, transnational cooperation would have had to amount to much more than lukewarm coordination in the EP.
This takes us to the second false dichotomy: between, on the one hand, grassroots organizing and mass mobilization and, on the other, electoral and parliamentary politics. There is no trade off there to be made — both need to be pursued simultaneously, as two mutually enforcing dimensions of the same strategy, although the emphasis may tactically fall on one or the other depending on context and timing. In short, the parties of the radical Left need to become again movement-parties — and stay that way even, indeed especially, when they become electorally successful. Looking back to the history of the European radical Left, the most effective parties at challenging the capitalist establishment and winning major concessions — from the British Labour Party in the first half of the twentieth century to the Italian Communist Party in the second — were those built upon militant rank-and-file organizations and a broader social infrastructure that fostered class consciousness and recruited people to the movement.
Ultimately, the task of transcending these false dichotomies and thereby qualitatively improving transnational cooperation comes down to programme. All the aforementioned issues are rooted in a long-term process of de-radicalization of the radical Left that goes back at least to 1989. Left-wing commentators often talk about the rightward shift of social democracy during the neoliberal age, but we tend to overlook how that process was also mirrored among the parties to its left. The latter has not been somehow impermeable to the dominant ideological paradigm. Few things in recent memory have revealed this fact more clearly than the arguments from the Left defending Syriza’s capitulation in July 2015 in terms that could ultimately be boiled down to the old neoliberal mantra — “there is no alternative”.
Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the radical Left is in fact neo-reformist: aiming to recover the post-war social democracy that social democracy itself has moved away from, while complementing it with New Left issues like gender and the environment. This is a question for another time, but the hitherto approach of combining a reformist electoral platform with a strategy of “marching through the institutions” has proven woefully inadequate to meaningfully challenge over four decades of neoliberal hegemony. More muscular vision and strategy are needed, capable of going to the root of the problem — a society governed by the quest for profit maximization. After all, as Karl Marx once put it, “to be radical is to grasp things by the root”.
Objective Challenges
Of course, the underwhelming state of left-wing internationalism during and since the Eurocrisis has also had more objective causes — not least, the sheer scarcity of resources to engage in and nurture transnational activism. It is self-evident that parties of the radical Left do not have the same level of access to state resources as mainstream parties or their generous donors, who now seem to be flocking to funding (and sometimes founding) far-right populist parties, either. By contrast, left-wing parties rely on a mix of meagre state funding (in itself a further incentive for the prioritization of electoralism) and contributions from members and supporters. Yet not only do these parties lack the mass membership that some Communist parties once had, but the crisis hit the worst precisely among some of the key constituencies of the radical Left: public sector workers and the youth. The material impact of the crisis and austerity severely undermined internationalism on a wider scale and was a key factor in the anti-austerity movements across Europe maintaining a largely national character and — in contrast to the previous alter-globalization movement — thus failing to develop into an actual transnational movement (the partial exceptions of Blockupy and AlterSummit notwithstanding).
Another objective and more structural obstacle to transnational cooperation on the European Left is the heterogeneity, if not lack of a transnational social base to build upon. The popular classes tend to be fragmented in each country, not to mention at a continental level. While there may be a European working class that operates in a highly integrated single market and, to some extent, monetary union, this is merely a class in itself and not (yet) a class for itself, to use Marx’s famous formulation. In other words, the European working class exists, but is not fully aware of its existence and shared interests.
While much can be said about the failure of the European trade unions to foster that class consciousness, sadly that failure is sometimes also reflected on the radical Left. In the words of the former leader of the Dutch Socialist Party, Jan Marijnissen, “most Frisians don’t give a damn about the Greeks”. That may be true, but parties like his have the task to challenge that attitude and cultivate cross-border solidarity and unity among the popular classes rather than reify existing cleavages. The objective need to do so goes as far back as the beginnings of socialism itself, in answer to the internationalization of capital, but it has become all the more pressing in the highly integrated European market we have today.
A Path Forward
While downplaying exogenous difficulties would be a mistake, treating them as immutable features over which the radical Left has no agency is also a mistake. To paraphrase Marx, parties make their own choices, even if not in circumstances of their own choosing. In this case, the parties of the radical Left are doing little to change some of the circumstances with which they are confronted. Doing more than that would require some significant changes in their programme, strategy, and methods, which the ELA is yet to prove that is willing to make. Two such tasks stand out in particular.
First, the parties of the radical Left should change the top-down character of their transnational cooperation and prioritize building cross-border solidarity and campaigns around concrete policies aimed at the most pressing issues facing the popular classes — from housing to wages to the looming spectre of war. For that, parties need to be better at mobilizing their most valuable resource: their activists and supporters. At the same time, they need to engage and coordinate more closely with trade unions, social movements, and other grassroots groups.
The 2017 strike by Ryanair pilots or the Make Amazon Pay campaign, to give but two relatively recent examples, testify to the potential power of transnational mobilization, particularly in such an interconnected market as the EU. This does not at all entail dropping the work in institutions like the European Parliament, which currently monopolizes their transnational activity. It means doing both, in a complementary and cross-fertilizing way. After all, most major social gains in the past century were won through a combination of mass mobilization and institutional politics.
Second, the radical Left needs to bring to the table a bold, transformative vision for Europe that can inspire that kind of transnational mobilization, and which can stand in contrast to the bankrupt policies of both the neoliberal centre and the populist far right. Views over the question of the EU diverge in all political families, but do not seem to affect their cohesion and effectiveness as much as with the radical Left. Differences should not be brushed over or ignored, but should not be the reason for international fragmentation — they can be accommodated within a common organizational framework. However, this kind of unity should be based upon something better than what we see at the moment: an alternative vision of democratic and popular European (and global) cooperation, the kind of vision that would require the radical Left to be radical once again.
That means going beyond its current neo-reformist outlook. It means proposing and fighting for a programme that links immediate demands around jobs, housing, public services, international peace, and the environment to the existential need for a socialist transformation of society — one based on the democratic control of resources in the service of human needs rather than profit. In times of increasing militarism, authoritarian neoliberalism, and climate disaster, this is a historical task that only a radical, popular, and internationalist Left can shoulder.
Vladimir Bortun is a political scientist at the University of Oxford, working on political elites, class representation, and radical-left parties. His most recent book is Crisis, Austerity and Transnational Party Cooperation in Southern Europe.