The Radical Left before the May 2014 EU election

Radical left parties are set for important gains in the coming European Parliament election of 22-25 May 2014, predict the pollsters (see pollwatch2014, scenaripolitici and Transform!).

An overview of past EP election results (1979-2009) shows that in this kind of election the radical left has not yet fully recovered from the deep crisis experienced by its Communist predecessors in the 1980s (see table).

Since 1994 the share of votes of the contemporary radical left has stagnated around 7%; this was the outcome of a limited recovery in Western European countries compensated by an extreme weakness in most of the newly accessed (Eastern and Southern) member states.
Its parliamentary representation has been lower (5-6%) and declining, due to the combined negative impact of organisational fragmentation, electoral legislations and EU enlargements.

The predicted doubling of the GUE-NGL parliamentary group would put the radical left back on the EU political map and could have important spill-over effects on the national politics of some Southern European countries - a victory of SYRIZA in Greece, in particular, would smooth its way toward a future radical governmental majority.
Popular dissatisfaction toward the present state of the European project is widespread and growing. It remains however to be seen if this will be capitalised more by the (predominantly "critical Europeanist") radical left or by anti-European populist and right-wing forces.

General Elections in Belgium

Here below are the detailed results of the Belgian legislative elections of 13 June 2010.

The vote confirmed the increasing polarisation of the country’s politics along the lines of linguistic nationalism.
The big winner of the day was the Flemish nationalist party Nieuw-Flaamse Alliantie (N-VA), which broke from its former christian-democratic partner and manage to revive the fortunes of non-fascist Flemish separatism. The party spectacularly won the status of biggest national political force (17.40%) and stole votes from all Flemish political parties, including the Vlaams Belang. As a reaction the Walloon region boosted the score of the Socialist Party, the traditional party of the secular and progressive francophone milieus, which rose to 13.70% and won a splendind victory in the deprived Hainault province (48.18%).
All other currents on the right were severly squeezed - the liberals, the christian-democrats and the far right all lost heavily - and the feeling of an istitutional crisis resulted in the proliferation of small breakaway parties, only one of whose (the Parti Populaire) managed to gather a significant level of support.
The greens maintained themselves at 9.18%.

The task of forming a stable coalition looks thus daunting.

The results for the various forces of the radical left were both encouraging and problematic.
The post-Maoist PVDA+/PTB, the only organisation with a national coverage, had a brilliant score (1.55%), more than doubling its votes and establishing a clear hegemony on the far left scene in both sides of the country.
In Wallonia most of the other organisations, including the PC (the local Communist party), the LCR (the local section of the Fourth International), the PSL/LSP (the local section of the Committee for a Workers’ International) and the activists of CAP run a joint list called Front des Gauches. The list fared just 0.30% nationally, slightly less than the sum of the PC and CAP lists in 2007, and in the Communist stronghold of the Hainault province saw its votes halved.
In the Flanders the LSP/PSL run under its own banners – without any competition from the other members of the Front – and fared a meagre 0.10%, about half of the CAP votes in 2007.
In Brussels the experiment of the list Egalité, uniting socialist and Muslim activists along the lines of the British RESPECT model, gathered an interesting 0.09% of the national vote (0.68% in the Brussels constituency).
Finally, the Socialist breakaway group MS+ failed to make any impact (0.04% of the national vote).


TAB. 1 - RESULTS


TAB. 2 - RESULTS BY POLITICAL FAMILY