ABSTRACT
Much has been written on the recent fortunes of Social Democracy. One strand is concerned with electoral results. After varying lengths of time in opposition, Social Democratic parties returned to government in the late 1990s. Blair and Schröder (1999: 1) open their text on the Third Way by stating that ‘Social democrats are in government in almost all the countries of the Union’. As an editorial in the British Daily Telegraph (11 June 2002: 19) put it, in 1997 when New Labour was still new, the Left was ascendant everywhere, with socialists or Social Democrats in government in thirteen and a half of the 15 EU states (the exception was Spain, with the half in Ireland whose parties do not fit the classic Left-Right definitions). Dyson (1999: 195) claims that following the German election of 1998 West European Social Democracy found itself in a uniquely advantageous position. For the first time in the history of the European Union social-democratic-led governments were in power in Bonn, London and Paris; the Party of European Socialists (see Aust, Chapter 10, this volume) was represented in the leadership of 11 of the 15 governments. By August 2000, according to Green-Pedersen et al. (2001), they were in government in 10 out of 15 EU nations. This electoral dominance was termed by Cuperus and Kandel (1998) ‘the magical return of Social Democracy’. However, as we entered the new millennium the magic seemed to be wearing off (see Bonoli, Chapter 11, this volume). The left lost power in countries such as Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands and France. For a time, it appeared that only Britain was immune to the return of the right, where in 2001 New Labour secured another landslide electoral victory. More recently, Social Democratic governments have been (just) re-elected in Sweden and Germany, and the Dutch PvdA regained much of the support they lost some eight months earlier in an Election of January 2003. On the other hand, in the same month the German SDP lost regional elections and so the Christian Democrats now have the power to veto SDP legislation in the Bundersrat. The electoral prospects for Social Democracy, then, are very uncertain.
