Opposition Blues

(2 of 2)

The result: weak oppositions and the rise of what the ICM's Sparrow calls the "No Party." In a recent ICM poll, 47% of British respondents said they now identify themselves with no party. Of this group, 81% agreed that "none of the parties seems to have any really new or attractive policies for tackling problems" and 61% said: "Whichever party is in power, it makes little or no difference to what actually happens in the country."

So how can oppositions get out of the No Party hole? One strategy, says Charles Grant, Director of the Centre for European Reform, a London think tank, is a return to ideological purity. "The activists think, if the party were only more extreme, then they would win the election," he says. France's Socialists are struggling with this option now. Socialist Lionel Jospin, who was routed in first-round presidential elections in April 2002, had one of the best economic records of any recent French Prime Minister: he grew the economy, created jobs, privatized state-owned companies. But the Socialists have been unable, or unwilling, to trade on those achievements, because the party is still in the throes of an identity crisis. Some want to take it back to its socialist roots; others want to make it more mainstream. The most difficult task facing Socialist leaders, says Duhamel, will be "deciding whether to continue denying that they've become a relatively market-friendly, reform-minded party."

The second option for ambitious opposition leaders, says Grant, is the "moderately noisy" approach. Me-tooism doesn't get headlines, he says, "so they have to be a bit wild and crazy to get journalists to write about them." The danger, though, is that sophisticated voters who want results will regard this strategy as opportunistic — and punish the opposition even more.

In Britain, Duncan Smith has been trying a bit of both, to little effect. He's fighting a rumored leadership challenge and an investigation into his wife's alleged misuse of a job on his staff, while his Conservative Party — described by one of its activists as "a shambles on steroids" — is still traumatized by two landslide defeats in the past six years. Duncan Smith's recently announced policies are pretty Third Way-ish, trying to recast the Tories as the party that will fix public services. To please the focus groups, he has been offering plans for pensions and higher education funding that contradict his bedrock conservative principle of cheaper, smaller government.But none of it has helped. Nick Herbert, director of Reform, a Tory-oriented think tank, believes only a "bold, radical change that produces measurable results" will revive the Tories.

In Germany, the CDU/CSU can take heart from polls showing they would win an election hands down. More worrying are surveys that show them hurting from the No Party effect. One published last week in Der Spiegel asked if respondents were happy with Schröder, Stoiber, and CDU leader Angela Merkel: 68% were unhappy with Schröder, 40% with Stoiber and 55% with Merkel. "People don't like politicians," observes Peter Losche, a political scientist at the University of Göttingen. "They know that neither party has a solution to the current problems." Until they are found, the No Party is likely to become even more popular.