Adam Tooze is the director of the European Institute at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.From his May 2019 New Yorker Q&A with Isaac Chotiner:
[Chotiner:] It seems like the center left and center right keep falling away, even if individual economic conditions are O.K. I know that isn’t true in certain countries. In Austria, the center right did well, and—Visit Adam Tooze's website.
[Tooze:] And Spain. Spain is another key country. Once the U.K. leaves, it is the fourth-largest country within the E.U. And in Spain we see a reassertion of the social democratic Socialist Party, and it even looks as if the [center-right] People’s Party is coming back. So it is a very motley picture. But, to your point of what is going on with the center left and center right, I think that is indeed the core question. Part of the problem is that the center right was tempted to move away from its positions. It moved either to the far right, in the case of the French Republicans—they basically adopted a nationalist agenda—or, as critics of Merkel would say, she turned the C.D.U. into something more like the S.P.D. In terms of the agenda Merkel’s government has pursued, it is actually quite close to a social democracy, and, indeed, even the Green Party on various points. So that adds up to an incredible blurring of the lines. Certainly what has happened is the ability to silo a particular social constituency, a particular set of cultural values, a particular set of economic programs, even regions of the country, and say, “This is S.P.D. territory,” or, “This is Christian Democratic territory”—that’s gone. And so what we have are lots of different parties fishing in what, in many ways, is a soup of agenda items.
And if you combine that with anger at the status quo, it doesn’t seem like a good recipe for traditional parties.
Exactly. There is a branding issue. The most striking...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue