A growing trend in European politics is the disappearance of the center, which, as traditional two-party systems began to blur, had played a decisive role in building governing majorities, rounding out the votes of the winning bloc and generally, but not always, leaning toward the right. In France, centrist parties favored Gaullist majorities once the shadow of General de Gaulle had faded. And, in Europe in general, small centrist parties pivoted to tip the balance in favor of whichever came first.
European socialist parties struggled to make headway when they had powerful communist parties to their left, and it was François Mitterrand who broke the taboo in France with the pact with the PCF. But the right often found complicity in the center, complicating life for the left. The genuine case was Italy, where the Christian Democrats had a strong centrist group to hold off the PCI, until Berlusconi came along and turned everything upside down, opening the door to the nihilistic leadership of individuals with indomitable egos, culminating in the United States with Trump, who have turned the tables on the contractors.
It seems that the work of the center was meticulous and that the current financial and communications system doesn't tolerate it. Everything goes wholesale, to politics and social media, and the gray areas, of imprecise definition, like the center, are becoming blurred. So the protagonists of the alternations are changing. The role of complementing majorities that the center played now falls to a rising far right. With one no small consequence: the center could pull in one direction or the other. The far right, obviously, only pulls in its direction: the right must move closer to it if it wants to govern.
And all of this in a scene where we are simultaneously experiencing the blurring of the parties to the left of the Socialists, what was previously called the far left (the Communist parties and the dissident Trotskyist, Maoist, and other variants) and now, as befits less radicalized societies, euphemisms, where ego battles, the psychopathology of small differences, figures of inconsistency, often quickly sweep away the expectations created.
So right now in Europe, the right will need the far right to govern (in the absence of consistent alternatives in the center), and the Socialists will have to grow due to the risk that the groups to their left, on the decline, will shortchange them. However, in Spain there is a differential fact: the plurinational reality that makes two rather right-wing parties—Juntos, formerly CiU, and the PNV—play the role of the center. Who would you choose if you had to choose between the PSOE or the PP to govern? Normally, whichever comes first. But if the PP needed them and Vox, it would complicate its life. This is a time of uncertainty that could be enlightening.
