LAST WEEK’S IRISH ELECTIONS were supposed to provide a measuring stick for the wave of right-wing xenophobia that commentators warn is sweeping Europe. Spurred by a decade of dynamic growth, the country now has immigrants–tens of thousands of Balkan refugees and African laborers–for the first time in the modern era. And yet the two leading candidates of the newly formed Immigration Control Platform didn’t exactly have a banner day, drawing under a thousand votes apiece. If Ireland’s xenophobes are exhibiting any comradely dynamism at present, it’s only because the entire movement can be assembled in the same living room. The upshot of Ireland’s elections is the same as that of the other three held in Europe in recent weeks, namely that the center left fell to pieces. The slightly rightish Fianna Fail prime minister Bertie Ahern combined economic growth and a tough crime program to win 81 seats (4 more than last time) in the country’s 165-seat lower house. Michael Noonan of Fine Gael, Ireland’s limousine-liberal party, kept looking for tiny clouds in the radiant sky of the country’s economic expansion, warning that Ireland was heading towards a “culture of selfishness.” His party lost 23 of the 54 seats it had held–its worst result in 50 years. The country’s most overtly Blairite politician, Ruairi Quinn, saw his Labour party hold its seats, but lose about a fifth of its popular vote. A rising center-right tide doesn’t necessarily lift far-right boats. Take Germany. Heading into this fall’s elections, the Bavarian conservative Edmund Stoiber leads Socialist premier Gerhard Schroder by nine points in the polls. And in April’s Sachsen-Anhalt state elections, the news got even worse for Schroder. Christian Democrats saw their tally rise from 22 to 37 percent, while the Socialists dropped to just 20 percent, landing as the region’s third party. Less noted was that the hard right collapsed, too. In 1998, the right-wing German People’s party (DVU) took 12 percent of the vote in Sachsen-Anhalt. But this year the DVU didn’t even field candidates. A new law-and-order party headed by Judge Ronald Schill had high hopes. It had taken 19 percent of a municipal vote in Hamburg–nerve center of the World Trade Center bomb plot–in the first days after September 11. But Schill struggled to pull a mere 4 percent. So it may be wise to take the rise of the right in recent Dutch elections as a special case. For one thing, the late rightist candidate Pim Fortuyn made a steady effort to distance himself from the racism of France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. For another, Fortuyn’s assassination on May 6 unleashed a huge sympathy vote that may not be reproducible. Regarding the major parties, results in the Netherlands followed the pattern of Ireland, France, and Germany. The center-right Christian Democrats became the country’s largest party, increasing their representation by 50 percent, while Prime Minister Wim Kok’s Labour/Liberal coalition got its worst result since 1945, losing 37 of its 83 seats. Just as extraordinary as the late Fortuyn’s showing was the disappearance of the economy as an issue. Kok’s Labour party has done more than a pretty good job–it has made the Dutch economy the envy of Europe. Real wages have grown by a quarter, and unemployment has fallen to low single digits, under Kok’s premiership. (Similarly, Premier Lionel Jospin’s solid economic record in France, while not quite as impressive as Kok’s, was one for which no American politician would ever have been voted out of office.) A resurgent left that held 13 of 15 European governments in the late 1990s today holds fewer than half of them. So are we witnessing a collapse of the Old World left? Au contraire. Like a waterfowl diving for fish (a loon, maybe?), the left has been invisible for long enough that one could assume it’s drowned. But look carefully and you will see it resurfacing somewhere hundreds of yards away. There–off to the far left. The ex-Communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), in its day the most Stalinist party in Eastern Europe, is now Germany’s second party in parts of the former East (including Sachsen-Anhalt). And note the way, after its presidential loss, France’s Socialist party is rejiggering itself to fight June’s legislative elections. Such Clinton-style moderates as the former finance ministers Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius have been relieved of their leading roles; radicals, such as the former labor minister Martine Aubry, have taken their place. Palestine, not the bond market, is the issue of the day. In Ireland, the big story is that Fine Gael voters fled to two newer, more radical left parties: the Greens, who now hold 6 parliamentary seats; and the Irish Republican terrorist party, Sinn Fein, which went from 1 seat to 5. Imagine: In the wake of September 11, in what has for a decade been the most booming economy in Europe, a terrorist party triples its vote to 6.5 percent. The fiction persists, of course, that there is no link between the terrorist IRA and its “political wing,” Sinn Fein. But the convicted gunrunner Martin Ferris, who defeated a former foreign secretary to win his seat for Sinn Fein, sits on the IRA’s Army Council. The link between Gerry Adams and the IRA is the same as that between Yasser Arafat and the Al Aksa martyrs. And Sinn Fein’s victory came just weeks after revelations that IRA experts formed the nucleus of a virtual Academy of International Terrorism sponsored by the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces. The two main tendencies in the left’s reconstitution are environmentalism (the Greens) and radical anti-capitalism (Sinn Fein). The latter seems to be gaining the upper hand. In the days after the vote, it was Sinn Fein that called aggressively for a union of the parties of the “broad left,” and its initiatives were met with some sympathy. “The real opposition were the Greens and Sinn Fein . . . ,” said Green member of the European Parliament Patricia McKenna. “We need to build on our successes now.” One Europe-wide casualty of the latest wave of elections may be the ideological double standard that has been in force for several years. European politicians consider Le Pen an untouchable because his oratory resembles that of Vichy collaborationists. Fair enough. But why is there no stigma attached to voting for the IRA, who a decade ago were eviscerating pedestrians with plastic explosives? Why does public opinion look the other way when German Social Democrats form local coalitions with the ex-Communists? For years, European bien-pensants have cast the hard right as distinct from the center right for purposes of coalition-forming (Jacques Chirac must not only denounce the National Front but repudiate its supporters), but indistinguishable for the purposes of guilt by association (French Socialists march not just against the Italian hard right but against Silvio Berlusconi as well). The hard left, meanwhile, is indistinguishable from the left for purposes of coalition-forming (ex-Communists have helped govern in Paris and still do in Berlin) but distinct for the purposes of guilt by association (Jospin was never asked to repudiate France’s powerful Trotskyite vote). For weeks now, commentators at Britain’s Guardian and France’s Le Monde have been dumbstruck at the inability of left parties to “seize the center” of the electorate. It turns out that the European left’s problem with centrist voters is that it doesn’t particularly want them in the first place. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
