Will there ever be a European Obama?

Across the Atlantic, the election of Senator Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency is viewed from the political left with astonished embarrassment.

Astonishment, because until the very last moment most of the European left was convinced that Obama had no chance.

As an Italian Democratic Party activist put it on election eve, “Americans will never vote for a progressive, much less one who is black.”

Embarrassment, because Europe’s own progressive bloc is facing imminent collapse. “If we are not able to get our act together, it is perhaps the end of the French Socialist Party,” said Martine Aubry, mayor of the city of Lille.

The crisis is just as severe on the German and Italian left, which have been among the continent’s most influential political forces for more than a century. “The malaise is general,” says Pascal Delwit, professor of political science at the Free University of Brussels.

In part, this malaise is a tale of extraordinary successes – a durable legacy of universal public health care, workplace protections, subsidized housing and transportation – that eventually bred complacency, stagnation and a wariness of new ideas.

But the more lethal disease on Europe’s progressive flank is summed up in a popular joke making the rounds here. “What’s the definition of a leftist firing squad?” it asks.

The punchline: “Everyone forms a circle and starts shooting.”

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD

Nowhere is that joke more painful than France, where the Socialists’ search for a new leader this autumn declined into a ruthless struggle among high-profile party barons whom the French call “the elephants.”

In addition to Aubry, they include former prime minister Laurent Fabius, 2007 presidential candidate Segolene Royal, Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe and several others. All were key players as long ago as 1981, when President Francois Mitterrand came to power and governed for the following 14 years. Today, each heads up what amounts to a de facto sub-party within the Parti Socialiste.

For weeks, a furious mud-slinging war has been raging for the vacant leadership post, culminating in a hung referendum of 130,000 PS members amidst charges of widespread cheating and falsification of returns.

“I refuse to participate any longer in this charade,” said Joël Batteux, the Socialist mayor of the port of Saint-Nazaire, announcing his withdrawal from party affairs. “I am ashamed.”

“Absolutely nothing unites the Socialists anymore except their violent hatred (of each other),” gloated Frederic LeFebvre, a spokesman for the ruling party of conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy.

One consequence has been a vote hemorrhage, not only to the Sarkozy right but also to a revitalized extreme left. The Socialists show no sign of recovering either the presidency they lost to Gaullist Jacques Chirac in 1995, or the parliamentary majority they held until 2002.

Royal was smothered in a Sarkozy landslide in 2007. Five years earlier, former Socialist prime minister Leonel Jospin was beaten by both Chirac, a Gaullist, and more alarmingly, by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right National Front. “The Socialist Party is gravely ill,” Delanoe admitted.

From the perspective of Italy, however, the fragmentation of France’s left sounds like simplicity itself.

Overall, in the past decade, 24 parties describing themselves as “leftist” or “progressive” have won at least one percent of the nationwide vote in Italian elections, with the word “socialist” appearing in the names of 14 of them.

Although the left has taken power in Rome five times since 1992, none of its governments has lasted more than 18 months – and in each case, it fell not to pressure from the right, but due to the collapse of its own coalition.

In last May’s elections, which saw conservative Silvio Berlusconi return to the premiership with a large parliamentary majority, no fewer than 13 parties and coalitions divided the left vote – and the leading coalition, the Democratic Party, was itself composed of 12 different factions.

“What impresses me about America is that it can unite and change direction, dramatically, when change is necessary.” said Maurizio Poli, a newspaper distributor and book publicist in Tuscany. “In Italy, it just doesn’t work that way.”

BEHIND THE FALL

There is no single reason for the precipitous decline of the center-left in Europe, at the very moment of Obama’s resounding victory in “reactionary” America. Over decades of slow ossification, its parties have also fallen prey to developments outside their control.

The European center-right, and sometimes the extreme right, treated left governments as laboratories in which policy options could be tested. When a policy failed, it was a signpost announcing where not to go, and a rich source of attack points in the next election. When an issue resonated, it was eased into the conservative platform, no matter how bad the fit might seem to objective observers.

Gianfranco Fini, head of the otherwise xenophobic post-fascist National Alliance, took the lead in proposing that the best way to absorb thousands of immigrant workers into Italian society was to extend them voting rights and speed up applications for citizenship. The impossibly factionalized left, meanwhile, was split between moral sympathy for the immigrants on one hand, and blue-collar demands to protect “Italian jobs” on the other.

French President Sarkozy took aim at a related and even more sensitive blot on the progressive image of the Parti Socialiste. He appointed officials of Arab and black African ancestry – most of them Muslims with solid progressive credentials – to major cabinet posts. The Socialists themselves, by contrast, remain an overwhelmingly white and well-heeled club, educated at elite universities where Middle-Eastern or African faces are almost unknown, despite the fact that an estimated 15 percent of France’s population today has Islamic or Third World roots.

With good reason, the French media have dubbed the elephants and their herds “the Caviar Left.” Increasingly out of touch with voters, they and their continental allies paid scant attention to new political circumstances when the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War.

Put bluntly, they were incapable of saying “yes we can” to change.

“In Socialism, the ‘neo’ this or that, those who were against the old and for the new, haven’t always left good memories,” grumbled former French prime minister Jospin.

Heedless anti-Americanism became an excuse for failure to update policy initiatives and ideology. It was enough as long as the horrors of the Bush Administration made anti-Americanism a visceral reflex almost everywhere, crossing borders, class and income lines.

It stopped being enough when the unacknowledged damage of stagnation began to pile up, in the form of serial election shocks – and when much of the American public had unmistakably turned against Bush by 2006.

By the end of 2008, the shock of Barack Obama’s triumph put paid to any lingering illusions about where the progressive future was unfolding.

YES WE CEM

Historically, the biggest party on the European left has been Germany’s 145-year-old Social Democratic Party (SPD), the bastion of such eminent grandees as chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, as well as their most recent successor, Gerhard Schroeder.

Since Schroeder’s fall from office in 2005, the SPD has had five successive chairmen. The latest party candidate for the chancellorship, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is almost certain to be trounced in next September’s elections by the Christian Democrats’ Angela Merkel, the current chancellor.

The choice of Steinmeier to carry the progressive banner into the elections so outraged his principal rival, former SPD chairman Kurt Beck, that he all but resigned from the party, charging that he was the victim of a plot. In public opinion polls, the SPD’s support stands at barely 20 percent. “You have to go all the way back to the 1950s to find a similar result,” said Peter Losche, a public opinion analyst.

Thousands of SPD members have followed ex-party leader Oskar Lafontaine into the more radical Left Party, a coalition of western Germany’s Labor and Social Justice Party and the Party of Democratic Socialism, the main heir to East Germany’s defunct Communist regime.

Earlier this month, following a crushing setback for the left in the crucial state of Hesse, the daily newspaper Die Welt declared that the SPD is now “a pile of rubble.”

It is improbable that a European Obama will emerge in the most venerable progressive party in the world, however much the ghost of Willy Brandt might long for such an event. It might happen in France, if the young progressives now in Sarkozy’s cabinet return to the Socialist fold, although it is likely to be years before the party is ready for them. It will taken even more years for real change to take hold in lethargic Italy.

Where it just might come about sooner is in Germany — but not in Willy Brandt’s party.

The hope lies with 42-year-old Cem Ozdemir, the wunderkind of the environmentalist Green Party, who was first elected to the German Bundestag (parliament) in 1994 at the age of 28.

Ozdemir is a German-born scion of the country’s 2.6-mllion-strong ethnic Turkish population. One in five German residents is of foreign descent today, on the heels of the vast immigration wave that is redefining European demography. Last week he was elected head of the rising Greens, becoming first European of non-European ancestry to head up a major political party.

The resonances with Obama were not lost on his supporters, who have even borrowed an Obamian campaign slogan in the slightly altered form of “Yes We Cem.” Like Obama, he is a committed pragmatist, too young to feel burdened by the ideological hostilities of the 1960s, and has supported the participation of Green legislators in coalitions with both the SPD and the conservative Christian Democrats. And also like him, he is an eloquent voice for systematic change, for genuine new ideas, and not merely for the symbolism of an immigrant-descended German leader.

The message in his election as party chairman, he told the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, “is that it’s time to move on in Europe. We have to give up seeing every political figure from an ethnic minority as an ambassador of the country of his forefathers.”

His own dream, he says, sounding very much like the American president-elect, “is a color-blind society.”

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5