Makes sense in a European many-party setting, because while you might gain votes from the centre-right you’ll lose some to the leftist party for the same reason.
Doesn’t apply to a two-party system where there is no leftist party to take votes, the leftists have to vote for the center-left or nobody, and the further away from the right wing party they are the more activated they get by negative partisanship so they will generally vote center-left regardless.
They vote for nobody. Electoral turnout in the UK plummeted from 1997 on.
Low turnout is a feature (not a bug) of neoliberalism.
In the USA it’s more “The left has to vote for the center right because the other option is the far right”
This. Even our so called moderates are right of center. Biden is right of center. Even Bernie Sanders is just barely to the left on the scale. Obama is right of center, it’s wild. And yet Republicans call these right of center politicians socialists, and our media never asks any follow up questions about it. United States is fucked.
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.
They don’t do it to win votes. They do it because it’s all they are.
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.
“Clearly we just haven’t gone far right enough”
