A crushing election defeat for Britain’s Labour party has laid bare the dilemma facing Europe’s centre-left.
The left could have expected to capitalise on the 2007-2009 financial crisis when lax regulation allowed banks to catapult the world into chaos.
It didn’t happen.
Now, the mainstream is leaching support to populists with working class voters feeling most vulnerable to immigration and facing endemic job uncertainty.
In an age when austerity still holds sway, the centre-left faces a choice of embracing painful structural reforms or trying to protect traditional supporters from the economic winds blowing across the world.
Those that look best-placed are trying to combine the two.
One lesson from the British election is that parties must appeal to people’s aspirations rather than just promise to shield them from the new world order.
Tony Blair, Mandelson’s former boss, governed from the centre and delivered three big election wins, keeping Labour’s core vote onside with high levels of public spending.
Now, to paraphrase the note left by treasury minister Liam Byrne for his successor when Labour lost the 2010 election, the money has run out.
The rise of new parties across Europe has also shattered the calculation that the moderate left could take its traditional supporters for granted as they had nowhere else to go. Now they do - to Syriza, the National Front, UKIP and Podemos to name but a few.
Labour discovered that to its cost on May 7.
The harder left’s banner movement is Syriza in Greece. Its efforts to reject the austerity imposed by its creditors appear to have failed and left the country on the brink.
The similarly positioned Podemos in Spain has faltered. Latest opinion polls give it about 16% support, more than 10 points below its peak. The ruling centre-right People’s Party is back in front with elections due in November.
The starker example in Greece is centre-left PASOK, which governed for a large chunk of the last 30 years but, having presided over the country’s collapse into bailout, is now reduced to a handful of parliamentary seats.
Matteo Renzi appears to be the exception, driving through reforms that no other Italian leader has dared try, while remaining popular.
He faces an opposition in disarray and has mixed reforms with tax cuts for the lower paid and pensioners. More profoundly, the youthful Renzi has tapped into a national sense that this is the last chance to pull Italy out of a deep malaise.
The agonising now going on within the Labour party about where it went wrong will be watched by centre-left parties across Europe. For Labour it is particularly tricky since it was outflanked on the left by nationalists in Scotland but looked too left-wing for middle class voters in England.
