Vox leader Santiago Abascal at the Patriots for Europe event
21/10/2025
Escriptor i professor a la Universitat Ramon Llull
3 min

Is social democracy today simply an obsolete relic of the good old days of Europe's reconstruction after the Second World War? Expressed this way, the question has a provocative component, but it is ultimately legitimate. Analyses of the increasingly clear rise of the far right in the West (the rest of the world is currently operating with other ideological oppositions) modestly conceal the collapse of a social democracy that is no longer explicitly claimed by even the social democrats themselves. There are words in and words out, and this is one of them: just think of the language of the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia or that of the Spanish government. Neither Isla nor Sánchez use the word regularly. Reviled with wrinkled noses by the parody left that believes well-being is a capitulation of higher moral ideals, and also harassed by the extremists who have transformed resentment into a political program and historical amnesia into a long-term strategy, social democracy is going through one of its worst moments. It seems that for many people, social democracy is an exhausted political project, something from bygone days incompatible with the impoverishment of the middle class. There are even those who hold it responsible for a substantial share of the 2007/2008 crisis, having opted for constant and unlimited public debt: a kind of second bubble parallel to that of certain private productive sectors.

It is true that the immeasurable growth of construction was inextricably linked to municipalist policies based on transforming taxes on bricks and mortar into electoral sweets camouflaged under supposed "social policies" (in reality, they were, and often still are, "policies of condescension," to put it mildly). This analysis is open to qualification in many ways, but ultimately it fits with what has been happening since then. Certainly, social democracy is more than an obsolete epigone of European reconstruction; understood as an ideology, however, it is incomprehensible without appealing to the unrepeatable circumstances of five or six decades ago. For several years, social democrats across Europe argued that they were a balancing, even conciliatory, point between the radical statism of the communist bloc and liberal-based capitalism (today, due to those paradoxes of history, savage capitalism is part of a communist regime, the Chinese one). Half a century ago—in 1975, for example—all this social democracy stuff sounded very good. In fact, as things stood, it sounded like heavenly music, thanks in part to the idealization of the Scandinavian countries. Now, however, this balance between liberal democracies and something that de facto It no longer exists; it simply no longer has any meaning. It no longer makes sense, at least when it appeals to this kind of harmonization or balance between extremes that were swallowed up by history in 1989. The current challenges facing Western societies have little to do with all this, even though the USSR has returned repainted and under a different name (but not a different style). Apparently, people are concerned about other things and act accordingly at the polls. In the European Parliament, radical right-wing parties won 187 seats, almost 26% of the total, compared to the 135 they previously held. Although data broken down by social class for all EU countries is lacking, a growing proportion of the working class—especially in industrial areas affected by relocation, unemployment, or precarious employment—has shifted to the far right in reaction to globalization, immigration, and cultural change. In France, the National Regrouping Party (RR) has received clear majority support in working-class neighborhoods and rural areas, where the left-wing vote previously predominated. In Germany, the AfD has become the second-largest political force, with strong support in regions in the east of the country, that is, in the former communist Germany.

In any case, the discrediting of European social democracy does not exactly equate to a victory for the traditional right: this symmetrical and rigid system between right and left dissolved long ago. Citizens, naturally, look to the ballot box for solutions to their various problems, nothing else. If what they are offered are nostalgic appeals to the ideologically dual world of the Cold War, it may ultimately consummate the desertion of Europe's founding ideas.

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