Trouble in the mainstream

Two articles to contrast today. First, from Politico’s reporters on tension within the European centre-right between Ursula von der Leyen, the prime minister (called “president of the commission”) of the European Union, and Manfred Weber, leader of the centre-right group in the EU parliament.

Weber went into the last EU elections, in 2019, as the centre-right’s preferred candidate for prime minister. But left and centre groups won a majority between them, and although they were willing to tolerate a centre-right prime minister, in negotiations they were able to insist on the more moderate von der Leyen. Weber, however, has clearly not given up his ambitions for the top job.

As Politico explains:

But what’s at stake here is more than a personality clash: The two Germans are contending for the soul of Europe’s once all-powerful conservatives. While Weber has attempted to pull EU policies toward the right, von der Leyen has tacked closer to the center. The winner will likely shape Europe’s ideological direction for years to come.

While this is partly just a turf war within the arcane bureaucracy of the EU, it is also typical of the battle being fought within the centre-right worldwide. As I and others have said a number of times, strong mainstream centre-right parties are a vital support for democracy: when they disappear or turn feral, the system as a whole is in danger.

That lesson was brought home in unmistakable fashion by the Second World War, and for a generation or two afterwards most of the big centre-right parties stuck carefully to the democratic path. More recently, however, as memories of the fascist era faded and new far-right (or “populist”) parties lured away some of their voters, those parties have been tempted by the dark side. Some have welcomed far-right parties as coalition partners; others have tried to compete with them in policy terms.

Germany’s Christian Democrats have mostly held firm, but since the retirement of Angela Merkel and the election of the more conservative Friedrich Merz as leader, cracks have begun to appear. Last month Merz appeared to open the door to co-operation with the far-right party, Alternative for Germany, at municipal level, setting off a controversy within the party and putting the future of his leadership in doubt.

The second story is from Britain. Writing at Inside Story, Peter Kellner reviews a new book (Futures of Socialism: “Modernisation,” the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997, by Colm Murphy) on the struggle over the identity of the British Labour Party in the late twentieth century. It recounts, as Kellner puts it, “how Labour, step by painful step, shed its constitutional commitment to the abolition of capitalism and redefined its basic doctrine.”

Again, the lesson has wider application. The world socialist movement split in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917; those that became today’s big centre-left parties rejected the doctrine of violent revolution, but continued to adhere to socialism in the traditional sense – a planned economy with centralised ownership of capital – for several more decades.

Gradually they moved away, and while often continuing to call themselves socialists, came to accept the idea of the market economy. Germany’s Social Democrats broke with Marxism at a famous conference in Bad Godesberg in 1959. British Labour eventually followed suit, but not without some trauma. Socialism came to be redefined not as an economic doctrine but as, in Tony Blair’s words, “a moral assertion that individuals are interdependent.”

So centre-left parties too became thoroughly mainstream forces. Now, with democracy under siege, it looks as if some centre-right parties are undergoing the same process in reverse – having second thoughts about their support for the system and aligning themselves with the forces that aim to overthrow it.