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Spain’s center-right Partido Popular received a shellacking in yesterday’s general election, losing half of its seats. This loss is part of a remarkable continent-wide trend. European electoral competition, dominated since World War II — outside Scandinavia — by Christian Democrats and similar center-right parties, has changed fundamentally. Traditional European center-right parties are now in only marginally better shape than their social-democratic counterparts, but their decline has received much less attention.
One explanation for this lies in the salience of the relative success of Angela Merkel’s CDU. But while Germany is obviously an extremely important country in the heart of Europe, the resilience of its Christian Democratic party is exceptional. A quick tour of the other countries of (Western) Europe to see where things stand for the member parties of the European People’s Party, the Europe-wide coalition of center-right parties, will make that abundantly clear. (I will ignore the former Warsaw Pact countries here for the obvious reason that they were not allowed to hold free elections during the heyday of Christian-democratic governance.)
As we noted, the Spanish PP lost half of its seats in parliament over the weekend, receiving only 1 of every 6 votes. Fine, you say, Spain didn’t become a democracy until the last 70s and that doesn’t count. (Neither does Portugal, then, one of the few places where Christian-democrats continue to perform well). Let’s travel east, to Italy. Forza Italia, the EPP member there, holds exactly 1 out of 6 seats in Parliament. Alright, maybe that’s another exceptional case: the traditional Christian-democratic party there was destroyed in the 1990s when its voters, tired of the corrupt establishment, turned to Silvio Berlusconi. How about France? Les Républicains hold a little over 18% of the seats in the National Assembly and the center-right candidate failed to make the runoff in the most recent presidential election. Fine, maybe they never found someone to replace De Gaulle.
Let’s continue on our path north then, to Belgium. Belgium, of course, has both a Flemish and a Walloon EPP member, but even when we add up their seats they don’t surpass the 18% mark. The Netherlands it has to be then — surely the mighty Christian Democratic Appeal, which, in combination with its predecessor parties, governed without interruption from 1946 to 1994, will have held steady? It holds 19 out of 150 seats, or less than 13%.
Right across the North Sea, in the UK, there no longer is an EPP member: the Conservative Party left the EPP ten years ago to join the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe, which counts among it is members with representation in the European Parliament the neofascist Brothers of Italy, the theocratic Dutch SGP, the white nationalist Dutch Forum for Democracy, the Flemish nationalists of the New Flemish Alliance, and a number of Eastern European parties. (Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party left this fascinating alliance last year.) There is an EPP member in Ireland, Fine Gael, and they’re doing fine for now. Luxembourgish and Austrian Christian-democrats continue to hold on to a third voters in their countries — and to govern — but the overall picture is decidedly not pretty.
Despite all this, the EPP will probably manage to maintain its status as largest party in the European Parliament elections next month: Politico’s poll of polls forecast has it 24 seats ahead of the social-democratic S&D. 13 or so of those 24 seats are supposed to come from the problematic Fidesz party of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (the party is currently suspended from the EPP, whatever that means), who has moved away significantly from traditional Christian-democratic ideas, especially when it comes to immigration and the values of liberal democracy. Additionally, this projected advantage reflects social-democratic weakness as much as Christian-democratic strength. It seems unlikely at this point that the traditional center-left and center-right, combined, will be able to command a majority in the European Parliament. That would be a historical first, but there is no reason to think it will be a one-time occurrence.
Traditional European center-right parties are now in only marginally better shape than their social-democratic counterparts, but their decline has received much less attention.
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