The European Left Party

By Luke March and Richard Dunphy

With the stability of the European Union under threat and tensions between the national and supranational increasing, what will happen to the EU party system?

For the internationalist European left, European integration and the role of transnational parties represent a central contention and concern. In May 2004, the European radical left, representing parties to the left of social democracy and the Green party family, created the transnational European Left Party (EL), uniting parties like the German Die Linke, Italian Rifondazione Comunista and Greek Syriza. In 2009, the EL fought the European Parliament elections on the basis of a common manifesto, emerging over the last decade as an apparently stable actor at EU level.

As the first detailed study of the EL this book analyses the role of the party in European politics and the politics of the European radical left. What challenges will the EL have to overcome in order for it to become a significant force for the creation of a genuine, democratic European polity? To what degree has the EL enabled an increase in the electoral or policy influence of the radical left in Europe? Written by two of the foremost experts on the European left, this book is essential reading to those interested in how the left has fared in post-crisis Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526133939

Book preview

Figures

1.1 Organigram of a TNP in the EU party system

3.1 The European Left Party in the web of European radical left networks, 2012

7.1 Policy position of the EP groups on seven-point policy scale

Tables

1.1 European transnational party federations and their main characteristics

2.1 Periodisation of parties’ positions towards European integration during the lifetime of the Communists and Allies group in the European Parliament, 1973–89

3.1 The NELF: participants at 34th Meeting, Rome 2008

3.2 The development of the GUE/NGL: national components

3.3 Participants in the EACL (London Conference, 12 June 2011)

3.4 European Participants in the IMCWP (17th Meeting, Istanbul 2015)

3.5 Participants in the INITIATIVE of Communist and Workers’ Parties

3.6 EL members and observers, 2004–18

4.1 Composition of the Council of Chairpersons of the EL, 2018

4.2 Composition of the Executive Board of the EL, 2018

6.1 Electoral performance: EL members, observers and non-members compared

6.2 New adherents to the EL after the Founding Congress

6.3 Voting cohesion of European parliamentary groups

6.4 Ideological cohesion of GUE/NGL group, 2014–19 Parliament

6.5 Loyalty of member parties to the GUE/NGL group, 2009–12

6.6 The TNP affiliation of the European parliamentary groups

7.1 The degree of TNP interaction: the PES, Greens and EL compared

7.2 Policy priorities of the left-of-centre TNPs, 2009–14 EP elections

7.3 Changing views of neoliberalism from TNP manifestos

7.4 Matching positions between left-of-centre EP groups on key issues

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to a number of EL and GUE/NGL officials who kindly gave us much of their time during preparation of this manuscript, not least Giorgos Karatsioubanis and Martin Herberg, then at the EL office, Brussels. David Lundy and Carmen Hilario of the GUE/NGL, and Anna Striethorst, then of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Brussels Office, were among several who were extremely helpful. Many other interviewees are directly mentioned in the text. The views expressed here are, of course, the authors’ own. We also wish to thank our friends and families, as well as Manchester University Press for support and patience during the completion of the project. The Carnegie Trust of the Universities of Scotland provided some support for fieldwork for this project, as did the University of Edinburgh Strategic Research Support Fund.

Abbreviations

This list contains those abbreviations most commonly appearing in the text or tables. All other uncommon abbreviations are always accompanied by the full title when they first appear.

Introduction

The balance between the national and transnational has been a core dynamic in the emergence and development of the EU, ever since its origins in the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. To what degree can or should the EU transcend its nation-state components, and develop genuinely transnational structures and endeavours such as a common currency and common foreign policy/military presence? Many analysts (if not some political forces) accept that today's EU is ‘less than a state but far more than a traditional international organization’ (Wallace, Pollock and Young, 2015: 4). The aftermath of the Great Recession and in particular the strains of the ensuing financial and migration crises, have reinforced the relevance of the national–supranational tension. For instance, the policies of the European Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF)) towards Greece after 2010 were, according to the Troika's defenders, merely the systematic implementation of beneficial ‘reforms’ originating in common Euro-area rules and European values. Such reforms rightly took little regard of national proclivities (the former German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble even claimed that national elections ‘change nothing’ in terms of Greek financial responsibilities).¹ A more popular (and populist view) sees the Greek ‘reforms’ as the evisceration of national autonomy by an inflexible and unaccountable supranational club (‘fiscal waterboarding’, in the often-quoted words of the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis).² Brexit (the departure of the UK from the European Union (EU)) has also been notoriously intertwined and even fuelled by debates about the appropriate role for national divergence (‘sovereignty’) versus allegiance to the EU's common transnational rules (in particular the indivisibility of the ‘four freedoms’ of the EU's single market – freedom of goods, capital, services and labour).

Since the 1970s, a critical prism through which debates over intergovernmentalism versus transnationalism have been seen is the EU party system. From the outset, the EU institutions (above all the European Parliament (EP)) contained the nucleus of a nascent party system. EU federalists (above all the Christian Democrats) saw party groups in the EP as the germ of genuine transnationalism: organisations that could run candidates and election campaigns across borders, foster a genuine European consciousness and even aggregate disparate national electoral preferences into a pan-European citizenry. Such federalists envisioned a Europe des partis (Europe of parties) in opposition to General de Gaulle's intergovernmentalist vision of Europe des patries (Europe of nation-states) (Marquand, 1978). Such hopes were boosted by such developments as direct elections to the EP (1979) and new EU legislation since the Maastricht Treaty (1992), which recognises parties at the European level as a ‘factor for integration’ and since 2003 has included an increasing element of financing from the EU general budget (Hix and Lord, 1997; Hanley, 2008). There thus arose a voluminous literature on the transnational party federations (TNPs), sometimes called ‘Europarties’, and their potential as genuine transnational actors (e.g. Johansson and Zervakis, 2002; Lightfoot, 2005; Ladrech, 2006; van Hecke, 2010). At the same time, a number of authors remained deeply sceptical of such possibilities, continuing to regard the ‘Europarties’ as scarcely deserving the name, at best ‘timidly rising actors’ (Bardi, 2004: 20; see also Bartolini, 2005; Seiler, 2011). The Great Recession itself has strengthened such critiques: if European integration itself was under mortal threat, then whither parties at the European level?

European integration in general and the role of transnational parties in particular have been areas of central contention and concern for the European left, and above all the European radical left (those parties defining themselves as to the left of and not merely on the left of social democracy and the Green party family). The radical left has been among the most avowedly internationalist of all party families, yet paradoxically has been among the most reluctant to organise internationally in the European arena. Yet this paradox has been seldom studied. With the exception of the major communist parties and some country and regional case studies, European radical left parties (RLPs) received little academic attention in the decade or so after the USSR's demise. There has been a new swathe of works in recent years (e.g. March and Mudde, 2005; Olsen, Koß and Hough, 2010; Bale and Dunphy, 2011; March, 2011; Hudson, 2012; Amini, 2016; Chiocchetti, 2016; March and Keith, 2016). However, RLPs’ European activity is not a central focus of these newer sources and has had comparatively little coverage relative to subjects such as electoral and governmental performance. The most recent studies focus on RLPs’ relationship with (particularly anti-austerity) social movements (della Porta et al., 2017; Wennerhag, Fröhlich and Piotrowski, 2018), or on the nature of the new left-wing populism (e.g. Katsambekis and Kioupkiolis, 2019).

Indeed, many academic sources regard the radical left as largely a ‘Eurosceptic’ and populist force, with thereby a large amount of contiguity with the radical right (e.g. Hooghe, Marks and Wilson, 2002; Rooduijn and Akkerman, 2015; Hobolt and de Vries,,2016). This point of view reached its apogee in the influential article by Halikiopoulou, Nanou and Vasilopoulou (2012), which argues that the point of contact between left and right Euroscepticism is an alleged nationalist core.

Conversely, more nuanced sources unpack the nature of radical left ‘Euroscepticism’. Dunphy (2004: 3–6) was one of the first to analyse radical left views of European integration in detail, finding a multiplicity of views between ‘reformism’ (critical or less critical pro-integration sentiment, which is clearly a form of left Europeanism and can in no substantive way be regarded as ‘Euroscepticism’), anti-integrationism (Euro-rejectionism) and selective engagement. Almeida (2012: 67) concurs that the radical left ‘is one of the most divided party families in terms of attitudes towards the EU’ and finds itself ‘[b]etween reluctant Europeanism and hard Euroscepticism’. Furthermore, Charalambous (2013) shows how European integration directly affects the ‘communist dilemma’ (the strategic choice between moderation and radicalism) and therefore causes major tactical and programmatic differentiation between RLPs at national level.

Within this discussion of radical left ‘Euroscepticism’, the radical left's specific activity at European level has received only sporadic attention (e.g. Hix and Lord, 1997; Hanley, 2008; Holmes and Lightfoot, 2016). In part this was because for a long time there was little to analyse. Only in May 2004, significantly later than the major European party families, did the radical left create a TNP – the European Left Party (EL). After a slow start, the EL did appear to gain pace, uniting a core of relevant European parties, like the German Die Linke, Italian Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) and Greek Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza). In 2009, the EL fought the EP elections on the basis of a common manifesto. Although its election performance ultimately proved below par, it had by now emerged as an apparently stable actor at EU level. Moreover, with the emergent Great Recession as an arguably propitious backdrop for the radical left (which was eventually borne out by the successes of parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain), there was arguably scope for the EL to emerge as a more serious actor still. Yet it still has not received any sustained academic study, with the exception of Hudson (2012) and Calossi (2011; 2016), studies which are much more descriptive than analytical.

It was this context, then, that was the starting point for our study. We had four broad sets of questions in mind to guide our analysis. The first two related more broadly to the development of transnational parties. First, under what conditions might a TNP be ‘successful’? We wanted to address whether TNPs could indeed become ‘factors of integration’ as EU legislation and their defenders proclaimed, or whether their promise was ephemeral and likely to be evanescent given the apparent stalling of European integration after the Great Recession. Secondly, we aimed to focus on the role of the EL as a TNP. What kinds of challenge would the EL have to overcome in order for it to become a significant force for the creation of a genuine, democratic European polity? We aimed to compare these challenges with those confronting other TNPs to analyse the degree to which the EL was genuinely distinct.

Our other two sets of questions related more directly to the role of the EL in furthering the politics of the left. First, with an eye to the absence of previous detailed studies of the EL, we wanted to know how, and to what extent, had the EL fostered a consensus over positions towards the EU that had previously been conspicuously lacking among the radical left? We wanted to trace and examine the evolution of radical left positions within and towards the EL and to examine the degree to which these might mark a qualitative change. Secondly, to what degree had the EL enabled an increase in the electoral or policy influence of the radical left in Europe? We noted above that the EL was itself an increasingly consolidated and stable actor, and that certain radical left parties had made breakthroughs after the Great Recession. To what degree were these processes in any way inter-related?

The time of writing (2019) was a very appropriate time to review the development of the EL nearly fifteen years after its founding in May 2004. As the first preparations for the 2019 European Parliament elections got underway, it was beginning to look as if the wide variety of radical left responses to European integration might produce a number of rival EP electoral lists. Parties such as the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Dutch Socialist Party (SP), which remain significant electoral forces in their countries, have long been trenchant opponents of further European integration, and indeed of EU membership, and were certain to field their own lists of candidates (albeit, in the Portuguese case, in alliance with the Portuguese Greens and under the banner of the United Democratic Coalition). In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, former leader of the Parti de Gauche (PG) which he co-founded, and presidential candidate in 2017 for La France Insoumise (‘France Unbowed’ (FI)) (into which he subsumed the PG), was touring European countries seeking allies to run as part of a common electoral list provisionally known on the radical left as ‘Plan B’. The name refers to Mélenchon's plan to quit the Eurozone, and possibly the EU itself, if radical reform of the EU structures and treaties proves impossible to achieve. As Mélenchon polled nearly 20 per cent of the votes in the French presidential elections in 2017, and his supporters polled more than 11 per cent in the subsequent general elections, he clearly had become a political force to be reckoned with, at least in France. At the other extreme (in terms of attitudes towards European integration), the former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was seeking allies to run under the banner of his Democracy in Europe 2025 movement (DiEM-25), which seeks a radical democratisation and reform of the EU from within. He received pledges of support from radical left-wingers in a number of countries, including the recently formed Razem (‘Together’) party in Poland. Attempting to straddle these divisions, and to present an electoral list that included most of the radical left's shades of opinion on European integration, was the European Left Party – the radical left's first attempt at a pan-European political party.

Despite the aforementioned relative lack of coverage, there is no doubt that the radical left remains an important electoral force in many (but certainly not all) European countries, and that it has secured significant advances in recent years. For example, Walter Baier, analysing the position of the radical left in 2017 in just five European countries – Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, France and the Netherlands – found that they polled 9,126,000 votes, an increase of almost 20 per cent from the 7,515,000 votes these same parties in these five countries had polled at the previous elections. But, as Baier points out, though a ‘sizeable electoral factor’ they were ‘far from creating a political alternative’ for three reasons: because the social democrats refused cooperation; because the decline in social democratic votes made any mathematical ‘left’ majorities highly problematic, if not impossible; and (not least) because the growth in the radical left was far out-weighed by a more spectacular growth in the radical and populist right forces. These radical right parties, in the same countries and during the same time period, saw their electorate leap from 5,446,000 votes to 12,094,000 (Baier, 2018b: 157–8).

This underlines two stark and unavoidable truths that RLPs must confront. First, that they are struggling to offer a convincing alternative European vision, or an alternative to the crisis of European and global capitalism, to the racist, populist and nationalist policies offered by the radical right. And secondly, that divisions among and within the RLPs – both strategic divisions and divisions into rival electoral lists – always risk vitiating their energy and their credibility.

It is this background that reinforces the need for an in-depth study of the European Left Party, its evolution, achievements, failings and challenges; a study, moreover, that will involve a critical discussion of RLPs in general, as well as a comparative discussion of the EL and other TNPs, in particular those of the broad centre-left, the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the European Green Party (EGP).

When the EL was founded in 2004, it was a period when (as Gregor Gysi, EL President since 2016, puts it) ‘we lived in much quieter times … [and] there was hardly any premonition of the severity of the crises we are now facing’ (Gysi, 2018: 20). Fifteen years after its foundation, the first attempt to give the European radical left a transnational, pan-European party remains a significant achievement, as we hope to show in the study that follows. But it is also one that has not yet realised its full potential, remains hesitant and confused in some respects and, as we shall argue, has fallen short of the aspirations of some of its more federalist-inclined founders (such as the Italian Fausto Bertinotti and the German Lothar Bisky – both former EL presidents).

Part of the reason for the moderate nature of EL's achievement lies in organisational choices that it has made. These include its choice of near-invisibility as an independent actor inside the European Parliament (for fear of splitting the broader Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) to which its MEPs belong) and its adoption of the principle of consensus in internal decision-making (as opposed to, for example, qualified majority voting (QMV)) which has tended to slow down policy evolution and prevent the EL from becoming much more than the sum total of its constituent parts. As we shall argue, organisational decisions are intensely political; and the model of decision-making that the EL adopted at the outset, though problematic, was perhaps the inevitable reaction to the burden of history that some of its main components carry – an understandable reaction against the legacy of external interference and attempts at centralised control (from Moscow) that many communist parties experienced and which the least Stalinist among them are determined never to suffer again. For many radical left parties, freedom from external manipulation was a precondition of participation in the European Left Party.

Another part of the explanation for the EL's somewhat limited impact to date has to be the continuing existence of sometimes profound diverse programmatic orientations among its component parts – above all, over the key strategic issue of whether it is possible to reform and relaunch the European Union from within and, if so, how. As Gysi puts it, ‘it is above all … the differing programmatic orientations … that does not make it easy to move the EL forward’ (Gysi, 2018: 21). Pleading with his colleagues to initiate the sorts of discussion and exchange between member parties and organisations that would allow the EL's component parts to learn better from one another and help to clarify the key divergences, he continues: ‘we cannot operate simultaneously with two political slogans: fight corporate power! and back to the nation-state!. We have to choose one of them and give up the other … [the] left can exert influence, at least if it wants to … but this can only succeed if it throws all national narrow-mindedness overboard and really starts to exert influence in the EU. To do this it has to acquire coherence’ (Gysi, 2018: 22).

But this takes us precisely to the crux of the dilemma that the EL faces. It lacks such coherence. Its achievements have too often involved concentration on those ‘basic common denominator’ factors that all of its components share – a rejection of racism, militarism, gender inequality, social inequality and economic precarity (of, in a word, neoliberalism) while fudging the key strategic and even tactical issues of how to tackle the reality of the EU and its institutions. This has nothing to do with the common accusation of ‘Euroscepticism’ that is often aimed at radical left parties and which, in our study, we reject as both inadequate and misleading and as obscuring more than it clarifies (see below). To be sure, there are RLPs that still believe in ‘national roads to socialism’ and that even fetishise the nation-state as an agent of resistance to neoliberal globalisation and of social transformation. But there are also many strands of the European radical left that reject nationalism and believe passionately in the necessity of agreed, democratic, pan-European solutions to issues such as the fight against racism and the rights of migrants and refugees; the struggle against environmental degradation; the struggle for social and economic equality; and the battle for gender and sexual equality in the face of sexism and homophobia. Yet, this radical left is all too often divided internally also – between those who have despaired of being able to transform the actually existing European Union into the sort of open, democratic and federal Europe that would provide left and progressive forces with a new site of struggle; and those (such as the Syriza government in Greece since 2015, perhaps) who fail to see any possible future outside the Eurozone, or indeed the EU itself, however severe its faults and failings. It is this lack of strategic clarity that arguably stymies the EL, and it has grown to be a more urgent problem. Since 2008, the Great Recession has demanded a heavy price of many European countries and has resulted in major set-backs for workers’ rights across the continent. The growth of the populist, racist and authoritarian right, the often harsh treatment of refugees and immigrants, and the humiliation of the Greek government from the summer of 2015 onwards by the Troika have all added to a growing feeling on the radical left that the EU is increasingly detached from both the interests of working people and the basic principles and standards of representative democracy.

To such ‘radical leftists’, this EU is not even remotely connected any longer to the egalitarian social, democratic and federalist ideas that inspired the best of the Europeanist tradition – such as the Manifesto of Ventotene, produced by Altiero Spinelli and other Italian anti-fascist prisoners while in internal exile in Mussolini's Italy in June 1941. This document (which we discuss in chapter 2) inspired the post-war European Federalist Movement and was instrumental in the old Italian Communist Party's (PCI's) conversion to the cause of a federal Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It should be noted that the document preceded the European Economic Community (EEC)/EU and that its ideals cannot be conflated with that institution. Indeed, some radical leftists dispute whether the EEC/EU ever came remotely close to embodying such lofty ideals. They see it as always having ‘sold short’ the peoples of Europe. For example, two prominent leaders of the Portuguese Left Bloc (BE), Marisa Matias (a former Vice-President of the EL) and José Gusmão, have recently written explicitly on this point. (Their intervention is especially significant because the BE, an alliance of Eurocommunists, Trotskyists, New Leftists and others is a profoundly internationalist party – and not one ever steeped in the Stalinist tradition of ‘socialism in one country’.) They write:

Can we realistically hope for a Union in which left-wing policies can be implemented? Is there room for full democracy and citizen's choice in the European Union, or are we simply trying to make the best of an ultimately unsalvageable project? The answer to these questions of course constitutes the main strategic issue for the European left … Facing this issue is an unavoidable responsibility.

And they continue:

The main European delusion is the idea that the European Union's sorry state is due to the subversion of the generous and solidary intentions of its founding fathers. If we discard the propaganda about the European Social Model, which was never actually converted into real European law or policies, it becomes clear that the EU was never intended as a Union based on economic and social solidarity. In fact, it was never intended to be a Union in any way, shape or form. Since the very beginning, the European Union was all about free trade.

Having discussed the profound lack of democracy within EU institutions, they argue that the lesson of the Greek experience is that ‘a government of a peripheral country that is unwilling to contemplate and prepare for a break with the Eurozone is basically condemning itself to obey whatever orders it is given by the European institutions’. Their conclusion is that these institutions are by now unreformable and that ‘what we see is what we are going to keep getting … if we stick to generic rhetoric about how the united left is going to change the European Union, we will fool no-one but ourselves’ (Matias and Gusmão, 2018: 94–8).

This may seem like a pessimistic view of the EU, but it scarcely justifies the charge of ‘Euroscepticism’. It is a rejection of the EU, as it has evolved to date – not of the ideals of a democratic and federal Europe. It might better be described as ‘EU-scepticism’, or even better still ‘actually existing EU-scepticism’ (admittedly, a bit of a mouthful). It is certainly mistaken, in our view, to subscribe to the aforementioned view of Halikiopoulou, Nanou and Vasilopoulou (2012) that such views result from an alleged ‘nationalist’ core to left-wing ideology.

Moreover, as Cas Mudde (2012) argues, the concept of ‘Euroscepticism’ is proving increasingly problematic in general, given both the poor performance of the actually existing EU after the crisis, and the increasing diversity and multiplicity of EU-critical sentiment. It used to be possible to delineate ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Euroscepticism (i.e. principled versus qualified objection to the EU, in the terms popularised by Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2002). However, the practical application of such theoretical concepts was always more problematic. Moreover, when even ‘the traditional backbones of the European project, the Christian democratic and social democratic parties, are no longer immune to qualified opposition (or at least specific criticism)’ and European public opinion is increasingly ‘soft Eurosceptic’, the concept of Euroscepticism risks becoming too generic and catch-all (Mudde, 2012: 201). Mudde calls for finer conceptual frameworks, ‘which distinguish … between different types of opposition (and support) of the European project, but also between ideological and policy positions’. This is a helpful starting point, although our criticism of the term ‘Euroscepticism’ goes further.

For instance, in a recent study Dan Keith (2017) provides a comprehensive survey of previous attempts to conceptualise radical left parties’ attitude and orientations towards European integration and membership of the EU. While his intelligent and lively study highlights many of the problems inherent in the literature, he still retains a framework that categorises RLPs according to alleged forms of Euroscepticism – rejectionist, compromising, conditional and expansionist/integrationist. The latter refers to RLPs that reject the current configuration of the EU because it does not go far enough in the direction of a social and federal Union.

It seems to us (and as we shall exemplify throughout this study) that the application of the label ‘Eurosceptic’ in any form to parties that argue that the EU does not go far enough in the direction of full European integration is highly problematic. It obscures more than it enlightens. Moreover, Euroscepticism is often a loaded term, not least in its press usage, whereby it is conflated with populism and politicians such as Syriza's Alexis Tsipras are dubbed among the ‘Most dangerous politicians’ in Europe (der Spiegel, 2012). Behind it lurks the normative assumption that neoliberalism, or at the very least free market capitalism, is somehow the ‘natural form’ that European integration must take; and that to contest or reject this model in the name of an alternative model of European integration – even one that promises more European integration in at least some key policy fields and stronger European democracy – is to fall outside the ranks of the ‘true believers’. The logic of this approach is to lump together both Nigel Farage and Altiero Spinelli. It is not a helpful way of approaching the undoubtedly wide variety of programmatic orientations that exist within the EL, and the key strategic debates that the EL must have if it is ever to achieve greater coherence and influence. The present study is, therefore, sceptical of Euroscepticism.

To return to the question of the internal diversity of the EL, which has had such an impact on its ability to exert its influence on the European stage; as part of a useful summary of the main European RLPs on the eve of the 2014 European Parliament elections, Thilo Janssen (2014) outlines the attitudes towards the EU of the principal actors within the EL. The relevance of his summary has, if anything, increased since then as the impact of what might reasonably be called the Greek Tragedy has both sharpened the radical left's critique of the actually existing EU and had a polarising effect within the EL.

First, there are those