Problems and perspectives of contemporary European radical left parties: Chasing a lost world or still a world to win?

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the key European radical left parties, their ideological stances, their supporters and electoral performance, their links with social movements, policy impact, and reaction to the post-2008 economic crisis. The radical left is increasingly a stabilized, consolidated and permanent actor on the European political scene and has become a principal challenger to mainstream social democratic parties, although it has not fully overcome its own communist-era crisis and its failure so far demonstrably to exploit propitious economic conditions indicates severe weaknesses (particularly the absence of sufficiently electorally attractive strategic vision, the persistence of historical stigma in Eastern Europe, and still-persistent ideological and strategic conflicts). Should such problems be addressed, the contemporary socio-economic and political environment in Europe is only likely to increase the future appeal of the radical left, although radical left parties face significant challenges from Greens, radical right parties and the new European protest movements over which they, as yet, have little influence.

Keywords:

• radicalism
• extremism
• Marxism
• communism
• populism

Notes

¹For the most recent discussions of the literature on the European radical left and its inherent weaknesses see March (2011), and Olsen, Koß, and Hough (2010).

²These themes are developed further in March (2011).

³For a good summary see Striethorst (2011), from which data in section is derived.

⁴These categories are the author's own but are developed taking into account the roughly analogous categories of Tim Spier, Dietmar Wittich and Anna Striethorst outlined in Striethorst (2011).