By Stan Veuger

In two prophetic 2019 blog posts, I highlighted the underappreciated decline of Europe’s traditional
center-right, the mostly Christian democratic parties of the European People’s
Party (EPP), and the ever so slight recovery of the traditional center-left, the
social-democratic parties united in the Party of European Socialists. Both
trends have continued over the past two years.

Most salient of course is the situation in Germany, where Angela Merkel’s personal strength may have hidden an underlying decline in support for the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union. Polls now suggest that the CDU/CSU may lose a third of its popular support in next month’s election and end up with less than 25 percent of the vote. In Ireland, Fine Gael lost about a quarter of its seats in the 2020 general election after receiving only 20 percent of the popular vote. In March, the Dutch Christian Democratic Appeal received less than 10 percent of the popular vote, a loss from an already historically weak position. That same month Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party were finally forced out of the EPP. And last month the largest EPP member party in Bulgaria, GERB, lost a significant number of seats for the second time this year.

The strongest EPP result of the past two years was the OĽaNO
win in the Slovak general election. But a party founded in 2011 named Ordinary
People and Independent Personalities that only joined the EPP in 2019
is hardly a representative of traditional Christian democracy.

As a result of these developments, there are now only two
more EPP members than liberal (Renew Europe) ones, nine versus seven, among the heads of state and government
who form the European Council.

On the other side of the center, social-democrats have
continued their string of (mostly modest) successes. The Danish
social-democrats remained in power after their 2019 election victory. The
Finnish social-democrats won the 2019 election in that country and have led a
coalition government ever since. Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE won two Spanish general
elections in 2019 alone. This past January, Portuguese president Rebelo de
Sousa was reelected in a landslide, winning every municipality in the country.
The Dutch Labor party managed not to lose any further ground in the March
general election. They may yet merge their parliamentary block with the Green
Left, which would almost double their number of seats. And the Social
Democratic Party has looked strong in recent German polls, making a win next
month look more plausible than it has in years.

For now, at least, it is social-democrats who continue to dominate the left half of the European political spectrum, not the explicitly green left or the Corbynite revolutionary left of Podemos and Syriza.

The post As European Christian democrats continue their decline, social-democrats arise appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.