Burnt Out

• Share

TIRED AND ILL WITH PROSTATE CANcer, Francois Mitterrand sat silently in a Louis XV armchair at the Elysee Palace, watching election returns. Was it only a dozen years ago that a vigorous Mitterrand, newly elected as France's Socialist President, marched solemnly up the steps of the Pantheon and placed red roses on the tombs of three leftist heroes while the streets of Paris rang with victory celebrations? Now as the results of last week's parliamentary vote flickered across the TV screen, the numbers confirmed what all had suspected: the Socialist era was over in France. Mitterrand's party had been swamped by a right-wing tidal wave that swept up 460 of the 577 National Assembly seats and confronted the lame-duck President with the most lopsided conservative majority since the monarchy was restored in 1815.

The French election may well have signaled the final act in the history of West European socialism, whose roots, like the very notion of left and right politics, go back to the French Revolution. From Stockholm to Rome, from Lisbon to Bonn, socialist and social-democratic movements are in trouble. The Italian party is entangled in financial scandals that prompted Bettino Craxi's resignation as chairman and may put dozens of members behind bars. In Spain, Felipe Gonzalez's party could well face defeat in elections later this year. Britain's Labour Party has been unable to win a national election in 14 years, while Germany's Social Democratic Party has been frozen out of government since 1982. In Scandinavia, the long-ruling Social Democrats were ousted from power in the mid-1980s, but they have recently regained power in Denmark and Sweden, where their main task will be to trim back their own greatest achievement: the welfare state.

The challenges facing all these movements run far deeper than electoral miseries. The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe exposed the bankruptcy of the collectivist doctrines that lay at the heart of all socialist thought. "Socialism is a dirty word today," says French sociologist Alain Touraine. The French and Italian socialist parties are even considering changing their names to avoid the opprobrium that voters attach to them.

The crisis began building long before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The fundamental problem is that an ideology based on 19th century industrial relations has lost its meaning in a world where the nature of class and work has changed. The conditions that gave birth to socialism have ceased to exist. The improved lot of European workers -- rising prosperity, upward social mobility, increased access to property -- has lifted most of them into the middle class and deprived socialist parties of their natural electoral base. "As a result of economic changes, the working class all over the West has been shrinking since the 1960s," says Oxford University lecturer Vernon ) Bogdanor. "The old icons, the old ideology are outmoded." That leads some observers to pronounce the movement dead. "It's finished," says French social philosopher Jean-Francois Revel. "It was a great intellectual adventure that turned out to be a historical parenthesis."