Grandstand. Declared moribund since the 1980s, social democracy seems to be experiencing a certain electoral revival in Europe. The resilience of this ideology is less surprising than it looks. Theorized at the end of the 19th centuryand century, it survived the competition of fascism and communism, then the leftist and neoliberal criticisms of the 1970s and 1980s, which however ended its post-war golden age.
This capacity for reinvention has never convinced the French left. Its current leaders are part of a long tradition of mistrust. La France insoumise, the Communist Party (PCF) and the small Trotskyist formations remained faithful to their traditional anti-capitalism. Political ecology has always developed a radical critique of social-democratic productivism, deemed incapable of responding to climate challenges.
But the Socialist Party (PS) is paradoxically no better disposed towards social democracy. the ” model “ somewhat idealized of which Anne Hidalgo is today the apostle was formerly mocked in its ranks. In the aftermath of 1968, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then located on the left wing of French socialism, saw only one “social-mediocracy” to be overcome urgently.
His achievements, outside France, are however not negligible. At the end of the Second World War, the German, Austrian and Nordic social democrats renounced the break with capitalism, but enclosed it in a system of democratic regulations aimed at compensating for its tendency to produce inequality. Backed by mass parties that are well established in the factories thanks to their privileged links with united and powerful unions, these governments rely on the State to combine economic efficiency and social justice. Their desire to guarantee the safety of individuals from the cradle to the grave, made possible by strong growth and full employment, nevertheless has a darker side, that of the eugenics policies carried out in Scandinavia until 1976.
The art of compromise
Beyond the specificities of each national experience, the undeniable successes of social democracy are based on a compromise between workers and bosses. Reassured by the absence of questioning of private property and the legitimacy of profit, the latter accepted the principle of redistributive policies of Keynesian inspiration, progressive taxation on labor and capital, a generous social State and a more great association of workers in company decisions.
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