European Politics is Turning French

I have a piece out in The American Interest, co-authored with my Brookings Institution Center on the United States and Europe colleague Célia Belin, titled "European politics Is Turning French." (If you're blocked by the paywall, the full text can also be read at Brookings' Order from Chaos). We describe ongoing political realignment in Europe, with the pro-EU center consolidating against centrifugal nationalist-populists, a process that damages the center-left in particular given the center-right bent of economic governance in the bloc. 

The 2017 French electoral cycle may be the textbook example of this overhaul of European politics... With Macron’s rise to power, French politics have gone through a process of “Macronification,” a unification of centrist constituencies around a pro-European agenda, leaving little air for anything but radical far-Left and far-Right parties adopting an anti-EU line... While both of France’s mainstream parties were badly wounded by “Macronification,” the Socialist Party (PS) was obliterated...

Indeed, in France and elsewhere, commitment to Europe feels increasingly like the kiss of death for social democrats. Although the European project is, fundamentally, a politically liberal idea—designed to transcend the dark forces of nationalism—to which the European Left is deeply attached, the European Union of today hardly resembles the leftist ideal of a “United States of Europe"... The European Left finds itself in the paradoxical situation of defending the symbolic value of the European Union while deploring its current policies. Paying a high price for their European commitment, leftwing parties either accede to power as responsible stakeholders stripped of their ideology and identity, or watch from outside government as the Right chips away at what remains of the legacy of 20th-century social democracy.

Where the left / center-left in Europe and America are going in this age of right-wing populists on the rise is one of my primary research interests and one I have in common with Célia, so expect more from us on this topic.