Study of European electoral data suggests social democratic parties alienate supporters by moving towards the political centre
  • PugJesus
    30•11 months ago

    “Clearly we just haven’t gone far right enough”

    • @WhatAmLemmy
      20•11 months ago

      This is the dog whistle of the neoliberal who the MSM and fashmedia label as “left” … usually because they agree with scientific facts, like the Earth revolving around the sun or masks preventing the spread of disease.

  • @[email protected]
    21•11 months ago

    The current Danish (third of the) government is Social Democrat in name only.

    They used to be actual Social Democrats back in the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, but it’s now a liberal (as in center right to right wing) party with downright racist immigration policies.

    Has been ever since Helle Thorning-Schmidt took over as leader of the party and it’s only gotten worse under Mette Frederiksen.

    • @[email protected]
      7•11 months ago

      Still probably better than Romania’s PSD (Partidul Social Democrat). The founding members were communist party members trying to grab power in a post-Ceacescu era, and have no real political ideology. Just corrupt bureaucrats trying to pilfer anything not bolted to the floor.

      It’s very sad to me that in modern Romanian politics there isn’t really a left-wing party. The most “sane” party is a center-right technocratic party (USR) that is at least better because they tend to mostly keep their hands off the bribe money.

  • @Ensign_CrabEnglish
    16•11 months ago

    They don’t do it to win votes. They do it because it’s all they are.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    2•11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy does not help centre-left parties win votes, according to new analysis of European electoral and polling data.

    However, the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or public spending are unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.

    Analysis showed little real voter competition between the centre left and the radical right, as some social democratic politicians argue.

    Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left.

    Fiscal orthodoxy – cutting taxes, capping spending, limiting public debt – worked for social democratic parties such as Tony Blair’s New Labour and Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany, but that was “a period of relative stability and growth”, he said.

    Even in Denmark, where a Social Democrat-led government has introduced one of Europe’s toughest anti-immigration regimes, electoral data suggested that restricting immigrants’ rights is not popular with a significant number of the party’s voters.

    The original article contains 821 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
    2•11 months ago

    Makes sense in a European many-party setting, because while you might gain votes from the centre-right you’ll lose some to the leftist party for the same reason.

    Doesn’t apply to a two-party system where there is no leftist party to take votes, the leftists have to vote for the center-left or nobody, and the further away from the right wing party they are the more activated they get by negative partisanship so they will generally vote center-left regardless.