Opposition Blues

The front-page cartoon in Corriere Della Sera, Italy's leading daily, said it all. A scrum of center-left opposition figures — communists, reformers, party chairmen, union bosses — hoisted a man named Gianfranco Fini on their shoulders and shouted: finalmente un leader! Finally — but Fini is no center-left leader. He's head of the right-wing, "post-fascist" National Alliance Party, and Deputy Prime Minister in Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition. The opposition can't stand Berlusconi, but they were feting his right-hand man because Fini had suggested that immigrants "who live, work and pay taxes in Italy" should be permitted to vote in local elections, a plan dear to the liberals' hearts.

When a ruling party or coalition takes a popular idea away from its opponents, grabs credit for it, and even manages to get the opposition cheering, that's smart politics. But it's also a sign of just how hapless opposition parties are right now, not just in Italy but in countries across Europe, where opposition groups of all political persuasions are having trouble finding their way out of the woods. By getting out in front on a good idea, Fini provided yet another reminder that Italy's fractious left has been rudderless since its crushing defeat by Berlusconi in 2001. In Britain, embattled Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith has been gaining scant ground on Prime Minister Tony Blair — even though Blair's popularity has plummeted since the war in Iraq. In France, the Socialists have been confused and silent, even as Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin weathered a summer of union discontent over pension and unemployment reforms. Only in Germany is the opposition enjoying any success, but even there the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian ally, the Christian Social Union (CSU), are seen as the lesser of evils. Why can't opposition parties get any traction?

Call it the revenge of the Third Way. Back in the late 1990s, leaders like Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder sold a pragmatic blend of fiscal realism and social justice, dubbed the Third Way. Outdated ideological divisions between right and left were dead, they declared, and a new kind of practical, effective politics would take their place. Now politicians from both sides of the old divide are converging on the middle ground — and as a result they're beginning to look "rather like two major grocery stores," says Nick Sparrow, managing director of ICM Research, a British polling firm. Political parties "offer very similar sorts of policies at very similar sorts of costs." The trouble is, people aren't buying the muddled result. Ruling parties aren't riding high — but they don't have opponents vivid or tough enough to take them down.

Schröder may be the most vulnerable of all; his handling of the economy torpedoed his popularity, yet CSU head Edmund Stoiber couldn't beat him in last year's election. Now Schröder is even less popular — though his latest reform package, a cut in benefits designed to force the long-term unemployed to accept jobs, was narrowly adopted last week. The next election isn't until 2006, but if it were held now, a recent Forsa Polling Institute survey found, the CDU/CSU would win 51% of the vote, compared to 25% for Schröder's Social Democratic Party. The irony is that the CDU/CSU's proposed reforms are basically a stronger dose of Schröder's medicine.

This is the dark side of the Third Way's embrace of fiscal rectitude. As Schröder's troubles show, economic reality leaves politicians precious little wiggle room, and parties have to think twice before promising to bail out troubled companies or increase spending to stimulate the economy. "The crisis among the opposition coincides with economic turmoil in which the margins for maneuver are limited," says French political commentator Alain Duhamel. "Opposition parties can't identify what they could or would do differently if they were in power."