“Clearly we just haven’t gone far right enough”
They are not moving from the left to the center, they did that long ago. Now they are in fact moving from the center to the right.
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.
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.
They don’t do it to win votes. They do it because it’s all they are.
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!
