Social Europe articles on politics

Following a string of national defeats, social-democrat parties are ill-prepared as the European Parliament elections loom. Success for the left in May will depend on its ability to reframe the political argument. The European left is going through a crisis. In an insightful article, ‘What happened to Europe’s left?’, Jan Rovny explains that the various political defeats […]

The election to the European Parliament in May has one major flaw: it cannot lead to the election of a democratic European government. There is one issue which cannot be ignored by parties intending to take part in the forthcoming European election—the absence of a democratic European government. This is the main cause of the […]

Sweden used to be revered for stemming inequality through progressive taxation and universal welfare. Now tax breaks for the wealthy and ‘free choice’ in public goods such as education cocoon the rich from the rest. What does inequality look like? In Sweden, rising inequality can be easily detected in data on income distribution. According to […]

Environmentalists and anti-poverty campaigners haven’t always seen themselves on the same side of Europe’s energy transition. Dramatic reduction in the cost of renewables is making a new alignment feasible.

The good news is that employment in the EU is at a record high. The bad news is that so much of it is insecure work—and a directive currently in train needs to be tough enough to fix that. Europe has a growing crisis of insecure work. Just before Christmas, the European Commission triumphantly announced that […]

In Ireland the absence of universal health- and childcare makes the insecurity of precarious work even greater. Often, policymaker narratives focus on the unemployment figures declining, yet we are seeing more and more workers experiencing or being at risk of in-work poverty, especially through precarious work. Precarious Work, Precarious Lives: how policy can create more […]

Social democracy is not the same as populism, argues Dimitrios Kotroyannos. And Alexis Tsipras remains a populist. Recently, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister and leader of the populist left-wing SYRIZA, which forms a coalition with the right-wing populist ANEL (Independent Greeks) party, has been trying to approach European social democratic leaders in a strategy of […]

Sheri Berman contends that the the left needs to develop distinct and feasible responses to immigration to counter the populists’ dystopian visions. The main challenges facing the left and Western democracies more generally fall into two core categories: economic and social. In recent years a general consensus emerged regarding the former that the left had moved […]

‘Social Europe’ can’t just be an empty slogan as the elections approach. It must be given real substance. There’s a very one-sided – ‘politically correct’ – debate about Europe at the moment. Criticism of Europe seems to be taboo, or at least attracts a lot of negative feedback. Criticism is labelled with the adjectives ‘nationalistic’ […]

James Wickham looks at mass immigration and the growth of inequality and shows why it is important to link immigration to changes in an economy’s occupational structure. The claim that immigration is economically beneficial appears to be an article of faith amongst those who consider themselves progressive. However, mere changes in total GDP often mean […]

Reformist social democracy has just two problems that result in its crisis.  The first is that it’s heading in the wrong direction.  The second is that it’s heading in the wrong direction in the wrong way.  If this crisis is to be averted then we need to understand why the ends and means are wrong […]