Europe’s social democratic parties are collapsing — and their leaders don’t seem to know how to reverse the trend.
For much of the 20th century, center-left parties rooted in trade unions and industrial labor were among Europe’s dominant political forces.
But today, many of them are politically unrecognizable — or in dire straits.
The latest example is Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, which last week suffered a dramatic slump in national elections. Although the party scored the most votes overall, its results were the worst since 1903.
Working-class electors frustrated by the party’s inaction on cost-of-living issues gravitated to the far-right Danish People’s Party, while left-wing voters frustrated with Frederiksen’s willingness to partner with the center right and take a hard line on migration defected to the Green Left.
Giacomo Filibeck, secretary-general of the Party of European Socialists — the pan-European entity comprising all of Europe’s national social democratic parties — told POLITICO the poor results were attributable to “anger” over the governing center-left party’s handling of the affordability crisis. The issue had become more pressing “due to the war in Iran, which raised energy prices and more,” he said.
Vagn Juhl-Larsen, a local-level Social Democrat party chairman in Denmark, put it more bluntly. “Voters have no respect for a party that does not pursue its own politics,” he said, slamming the Social Democrats’ leadership for giving up on “red” political values.
The situation in Denmark is hardly unique.
After 35 years of uninterrupted rule, Germany’s Social Democratic Party lost its hold on the industrial state of Rhineland-Palatinate in last week’s regional elections, where debate over the stagnant economy dominated the campaign. That defeat followed a March 8 thumping in Baden-Württemberg, where the SPD got just 5.5 percent of the votes cast.
In France, meanwhile, the center left claimed key cities such as Paris and Marseille in this month’s municipal elections, but remains missing in action at the national level. Over the past decade the once-dominant Socialist Party has declined so steeply that it was forced to sell its historic headquarters to pay off debts, and today controls just 65 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.
“The center left does not seem to know where it fits in Europe right now,” said political analyst Ricardo Vaz, a former deputy attaché at Portugal’s permanent representation to the EU. “And that identity crisis has led it to defend policy programs that are indistinguishable from those of the center right — a strategy that is neither clear, nor appealing for voters.”
The centrist dilemma
Europe’s center left was built on industrial workers, union members and working-class communities — a base that once powered leaders like Willy Brandt and François Mitterrand.
But that world no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, deindustrialization has shrunk the traditional blue-collar workforce, while union membership has declined across the continent. Europe’s social democratic parties have yet to find a coherent response to the changes in their traditional voting bloc.
“The center left has yet to come up with a new social contract, one that addresses the concerns of modern-day society,” Vaz said. “There’s no clear narrative on where social democrats stand on automation, artificial intelligence or the future of work.”
As their electorate shrinks, Vaz said, many of the bloc’s center-left parties have darted toward the center “in an ill-advised, and ultimately doomed, attempt to please everyone.”
The analyst said former social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Germany had “fallen into the centrist trap” while governing in coalition with the Greens and the economic-liberal Free Democratic Party from 2021 to 2025, failing to reach compromises on major issues like the climate crisis or the competitiveness of German industry.
Vaz said that U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was making a similar mistake by pursuing “ineffective centrism” that frustrates voters grappling with the cost-of-living crisis and an eroding welfare state.
“Voters want a clear response to concrete problems like the cost of housing,” he added, pointing to the decline of Portugal’s Socialist Party, which went from controlling an absolute majority of the country’s parliament in 2024 to being replaced by the far-right Chega group as Portugal’s leading opposition party last year.
Vaz argued that current European Council President António Costa, who served as Portugal’s prime minister for eight years, had squandered the opportunity to embark on structural reforms and tackle skyrocketing home prices. “The party’s historic voters — the working class — haven’t disappeared, they’ve just stopped supporting them and, in some cases, moved on to voting for a far right that has seized upon the anger generated by the affordability crisis,” he said.
Social democratic parties seem to be starting to listen to voters.
In Germany, Vice Chancellor and SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil delivered a reform speech last Wednesday in which he announced tax relief for 95 percent of German taxpayers and higher taxes on the rich.
Tobias Cremer, a German social democratic lawmaker in the European Parliament, said the announcement was spurred by the poor results in the regional elections, and showed the party was serious about delivering “on the bread and butter issues.”
“It’s about economic growth, it is social justice, but it’s also [about] reforming our economy in a way that it’s for us to determine how we work, not for the White House, not for the Kremlin, not for China,” he added.
The Trump bump
One unlikely boost for Europe’s center left has come from U.S. President Donald Trump, whose provocations have helped mobilize some voters.
MEP Cremer said Denmark’s Social Democrats, who have been in power since 2019, would likely have suffered an even worse defeat in the election had it not been for the voter sympathy generated by Frederiksen’s refusal to give in to Trump’s threats to annex Greenland.
“Our comrades in Denmark did an outstanding job, they actually moved up in a lot of surveys from a much harder position they were in,” he said. “If you have been in government … for years, it’s very often that you are in a difficult situation, and they have already shown that, by standing up to Trump, but also in the domestic policy area, they manage to catch up quite a lot.”
But Europe’s center left knows it can’t base its entire platform on anti-MAGA messaging. The way forward, some argue, is to follow the example set by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. He stands out as the leader of one of the only social democratic parties that remains popular among voters — in part because it has taken a firm stand on progressive issues and on governing with partners on the far left of the political spectrum.
A high-ranking Spanish government official, granted anonymity to speak freely, said while most of Europe’s center-left governments have “transformed into machines focused on managing the emergency situation of the moment” in an era of constant crisis, Sánchez’s governments had used challenges like the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to roll out progressive schemes like Spain’s minimum basic income and ramping up investments in renewables.
“Nearly everyone has focused on recovering the status quo,” the official said. “We’ve dedicated ourselves to transforming it.”
Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, said Sánchez had successfully seduced progressive voters by “appropriating issues vindicated by the political rivals to the left of his Socialist Party, from green energy to feminism, from liberal immigration policies to the defense of Palestinian statehood.”
By embracing “open-minded social values with somewhat progressive economic measures,” Simón said, Spain’s socialists have become one of the rare social democratic parties that has managed to retain the support of its voters during the last decade. Paradoxically, however, that strategy is undermining Sánchez’s long-term ability to remain in power.
“The parties to his left are being rendered redundant,” Simón explained. “That may cost him dearly when the next elections are held because without them he’ll struggle to secure a governing majority.”
Rasmus Buchsteiner and James Angelos contributed to this report from Berlin.
Why Europe’s social democrats can’t stop losing
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