Of course, it would help if we had another centre left party apart from the Greens. All the other parties are fighting over the Thatcherite centre right mantle.

In France the socialists are front runners (although they are serial bodgers of election victories).

In the US, Obama is likely to be re-elected and in Germany Merkel is facing an uphill battle.

The landscape could look very different by December 2013.

Time will tell and politics is like a pendulum. If the right parties don’t fix the economy with their ideas and don’t deliver growth and jobs then people will look elsewhere but the left will need to shout louder to get heard.

Perhaps a more accurate question on where the Left is in political terms is what is happening to Left wing ideals across the globe? It doesn’t really matter if in Britain, for example, the Labour Party eventually overturn the Tory/Lib Dem axis, because it is not a ‘victory’ for the Centre Left, it will be a victory for Centre, bordering on Centre Right ideology.

There is very little ‘Left wing’ on the Labour front bench.

In this article:

Matthew D’Ancona agreed, with the assertion “across Europe centre-Left parties are in electoral retreat”.

In the longer Noise of the Crowd article
Fraser Nelson agreed, with the assertion “across Europe centre-Left parties are in electoral retreat”.

At the last Labour Conference, Douglas Alexander said: “for a decade around 1997, the centre left was defeating the right. Now the centre right is beating the left”. Matthew D’Ancona agreed, with the assertion “across Europe centre-Left parties are in electoral retreat”.

Alas, I live in the UK and entirely missed out on the economic Left trumping the Right in the mid-Nineties. We just had another decade or so of Thatcherism.

Right-wing economics got us into the current mess. State socialism died in the late Eighties. They are both obsolete.

It seems, in my highly subjective view, that the political weather has changed in this year of protest and unrest. The initial response to the crisis was a desire to balance budgets and get over the crisis, and was unfavourable to left wing parties. Now we’re seeing what austerity is like, pay at the top is actually going up, and the economic outlook has actually got worse, people are poorer. I think we will see more of a shift to the left as a result.

I read an article some time ago saying that it took a few years after the 1929 crash for the left to do well in many countries. I suspect this will happen now – if the left can be organised and have good ideas. Neoliberalism is dead, but what will replace it?

I’m with Marx on this one, it won’t be until the right are allowed free reign that the left will rise.
6
Although I don’t agree with your term ‘state socialism’, it was capitalism with a bigger welfare state than Thatcher would have liked, it is precisely the left attempting to tinker with capitalism that has always failed.

Erm, anyone here heard of south america. Only one country there (or maybe two – depending on how you treat French Guiana) has a right-wing government.

Africa, tends to elect left-wing governments also. Indeed, even the Islamic parties coming to power in north Africa are probably best described as left-wing, as they clearly believe in state control of things.

So I assume this article is more about a certain subset of the world, where the left wing parties are not doing well in elections in the main?

How about we try something we haven’t had for the longest time – actual, proper liberalism? Surely the 20th century showed us that big state solutions, be they ‘leftwing’ or ‘rightwing’ do not work and tend to produce massive wars.

Instead of repeating the terrible errors of the 1930s, lets try peace, free trade and individual liberty. Look around; black uniforms, clamping down on freedom, hyping fear at every turn, constant wars. Is it not worth at least considering going back to true liberalism?

10
Yep, totally agree