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The social democracy of Europe is in a difficult position. Over the past decade, its parties in various countries have been decimated, destroyed by their internal contradictions and failures to meet the voters’ demands. Since the mid 2010s, this phenomenon has been observed as “Pasokification”, after the collapse of the Greek social democratic party Pasok between 2009 and 2015.
The pattern, however, has emerged differently in different countries, and all social democratic recessions tend to have unique causes that are particular to their host country. While Pasokification may describe the challenges to social democratic models of governance resulting from the 2008 financial crisis, what we are witnessing in the Western European family of social democratic parties today is something else; the fatal crash between social progressivism and immigrated not-so-progressive values.
A dangerous game with mass migration
In Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Nordic countries, social democratic parties have seen strategic value in embracing mass migration and accommodating non-natives as voters, often in turn becoming the party of multiculturalism in their respective countries. This is notorious, as most social democratic movements are historically rooted in genuine working class interests, and have espoused a type of social corporatism that has at times bordered on conservative and nationalistic. The social democratic rejection of social conservatism and embrace of mass migration and multiculturalism is as such a puzzling topic.
Some of these parties have through the 1990s and up until today won the immigrant vote and navigated its related hazards to relative success – the Social Democrats of Denmark are one such example. This party has, thanks to its confidently reestablished policy of strict immigration, integration, and opposition to multiculturalism, defused many of the tensions that exist in the rest of Western Europe, where nascent conservative and nationalist parties have cemented their positions as greater or second only to social democracy. Rather than the obvious party of multiculturalism, the Danish Social Democrats have instead become the obvious party for national stability, in many voters’ eyes.
One of the Danish proposals which has embodied much of the “common sense” impressions given by the country is the prohibition of non-European immigrants to settle in too many numbers in a given residential area. This method, popular among many right-wing outside observers, is designed to prevent the type of cultural issues that arise when unintegrated migrants segregate themselves away from the larger Danish society. Fewer bubbles of foreign cultures means less crime and a more seamless co-existence between Danes and immigrants, according to the model. In practice a rather heavy-handed and arbitrary set of laws, the “anti-ghetto” (“ghetto” is the legal term used in Denmark for segregated immigrant-dominated areas) has however received much criticism for how it targets people based on their non-Western origin and forcibly evicts them from their homes. Despite this, this approach, while not invented by the Danish Social Democrats, is whole-heartedly supported by the party. Its embrace of policies that strike at the heart of immigrant separatism has made the Social Democrats enduringly popular in Denmark, but it has also made them very different from their sister parties in Europe.
In countries such as Germany (SPD) and the United Kingdom (Labour), social democratic parties have instead had their status as one of the two major governing parties greatly eroded by nationalist upstarts. While this can perhaps be partly attributable to “Pasokification” (the failure of social democratic economic thought to respond to the economics of the 2010s), it is mainly caused by the contradiction between the social democratic ethos of unity, stability, and progressivism, and the consequences of mass immigration; that social democracy in many Western European countries may be perceived to tolerate Islamic extremism and other anti-Western ideologies is hardly news to contemporary conservatives.
As a result of its tolerance for many problematic attitudes that tend to arise in certain immigrant groups, social democratic parties may also lose support from other immigrant groups. There is for example the phenomenon of refugees in Europe being dismayed, because they see that the violence that they fled from in their own home country has followed them to their supposed place of refuge. Many of those who leave the Muslim world do so because of armed conflicts and persecution by religious radicals, which they subsequently find is becoming increasingly commonplace in France, Sweden, or the United Kingdom, due to the uncontrolled immigration and non-existent integration. This is particularly common among groups that belong to vulnerable minorities in their home countries, such as smaller sects of Muslims, and Christians. In Sweden, for example, there are many Christian Assyrians who identify politically with the right wing for their stricter immigration policy.
Many social democratic parties, while maintaining a high tolerance for immigrated value systems that run counter to Western values, display occasional awareness of this dynamic. It is not uncommon for parties such as Labour in the United Kingdom, or the Social Democrats in Sweden, to make gestures to re-affirm social progressivism as their guiding star, especially when their commitment to this cause has come under questioning. One example is the Labour government’s acknowledgement of (and so far surface-level) inquiry into the so-called grooming gang scandals which saw predominantly immigrant communities systematically sexually abuse girls in England, often with an intolerant Islamic pretext. The Social Democrats in Sweden have also for many years been very critical of confessional schools, which affects the way that Muslims are able to separate their children from the common Swedish school system (although a ban on such school is arguably something that leaves Christian schools most affected).
One of the consequences of compromising too much with the support of the immigrated, and generally Muslim, groups, is that they often have motivations to splinter off into smaller parties that challenge social democracy from the left. A few examples, such as former Labour candidates in local British elections running independently on a pro-Palestine and pro-Islam platform, the Denk parti in the Netherlands, and the Nyans party in Sweden, show that European social democracy may have underestimated to what degree immigration from outside of Europe will complicate and diversify the voting population.
Can social democracy afford to keep playing its strategy?
Social democracy, being part of the European 20th-century political legacy, is rarely viewed as an idealistic movement in the current day. Rather, they are representatives of an old establishment, one that struggles to come up with original ideas and to keep up with the far more dynamic and energetic national-conservatism of the 2020s. One common analysis of social democratic parties is that they are defined by cold, power-oriented pragmatism, and may adapt their position on just about any topic so long as it benefits their grip on government; this is common in right-wing circles in Sweden, where social democracy has left its perhaps most extensive mark out of any European country.
This analysis is of course rooted in antagonism to social democracy, and vastly simplifies the motivations of such parties. A derivative ‘theory’ of social democratic ambition is that it out of foolishness – and not out of malignancy – simply stretched too thin in its attempt to deliver abundancy for all, forgetting that the state’s traditional priority of its own citizens is not out of selfishness, but merely a practical necessity.
Nonetheless, this perspective can rationalise social democracy’s embrace of mass migration and Islam; it creates a close relationship between the party and the immigrant communities, which often is translated into political support that plays into familiar social democratic Marxist class analysis – the oppressed immigrant versus the selfish native. But on the flip-side, social democracy can also play critics of mass migration, as unlimited immigration undermines the labour market, undercuts wages, and has cultural implications that run counter to the progressive utopia that social democracy strives for. Typically, the parties of its kind have managed to balance both the native European vote and the immigrant vote by appealing to both sides in various forums. But how long will this duality strategy actually work to keep social democracy relevant?
Labour’s gambit
We’ve seen this duality, to some bordering on out-right duplicity, played to great effect in various countries. In the United Kingdom, Labour’s Keir Starmer shocked many left-wing ideologues with his recent “island of strangers” speech, where he acknowledged that uncontrolled mass migration has made British cities unrecognisable, and where ethnic strife, foreign cultural imports, and deteriorating social trust has all but replaced the native culture.
The Labour government has also been able to paint itself as the more sustainable alternative when it comes to migration, due to the severe mismanagement of the Tories through the 2010s up until 2024. Even with a “modest” 500 000 arrivals each year, Labour would be putting a relatively strict immigration in place compared to the maddening wide-open borders of Boris Johnson and the Tories that are still in effect.
Starmer’s 180 degrees turn on migration (a very relative turn, to be certain) came amid worries about the threat the growth of the populist Reform UK, which is deemed to be the sensible party on the issue, may pose to Labour. But as it currently stands, it cannot be determined whether Labour has grown from Starmer’s ‘conservative’ twist or not. Its polling reflects hopeless obsolescence, akin to that of its sister parties in most of Europe, rather than the force that won a landslide victory last summer.
Even if Starmer may have won Labour a number of centrist fence-sitters and managed to temporarily retain the attention of some of the anti-immigration white English working class, he is facing strong condemnation for his new view on migration from the wider left-wing movement in Britain. Far-left activists, radicals, and certain immigrant groups, who have over the past decades come to make out more and more of the party’s manpower, clearly do not accept Starmer’s gambit to win over right-wing votes. These are the people who identified themselves with Labour when the party was pro-mass migration and when it adopted woke identity politics. There was already discontent among these radical grassroots when Starmer attempted to do away with the Corbynite elements of Labour, and returned the party closer to the centre of politics.
In his attempt to save his party from the onslaught of Reform UK, Starmer may have jeopardised the support from the new generation of Labour voters, and in turn won none of the disillusioned working class that now votes right-wing. The polling shows that there may be a limit to how long the electorate is willing to put up with the contradictions that Labour, and social democracy in other Western European countries, have so long attempted used as a strategy.
Swedish social democracy’s reform attempt blocked
The Swedish Social Democrats held their biannual congress at the end of May, which had long been anticipated as the opportunity for the current leadership, trying to free itself of the burdens from the reign between 2014 and 2022, to set in stone a “strict” immigration policy. The party has since the electoral defeat in 2022 been engaged in a sort of revisionist history, where it complicates its involvement in the migration and criminal chaos that Sweden has endured since the mid-2010s. The new migration policy has been understood to be in line with the current centre-right government which is coloured by the support from the nationalist Sweden Democrats.
But it was not that easy for party leader Magdalena Andersson to get the party congress to adopt a new outlook on migration. The proposal that passed the vote was not what had been hyped up in the media for two years, but was watered down by the pro-migration elements that have increasingly been constituting the party since the 1990s.
While the party leadership was looking to the right, the radical grassroots prevented the Social Democrats from going farther than the leash would allow. And the leash is, as in many social democratic parties in Europe, held by far-left activists and groups who do not wish to see a sensible and conservative migration policy.
The Social Democrats in Sweden are in the same boat as Labour and many of its sister parties in Europe. It is unlikely what they will win by reneging on the politics of their recent past, since so much of the party in the current day is attracted to exactly that kind of politics.
And where does this leave ordinary voters in the middle, or those who have abandoned the centre-left and become conservatives or nationalists? It remains to be seen, but there is a lot to indicate that many of them now see social democracy’s in-built contradictions clearer than ever before.
Beyond saving… or?
How can social democracy, in so many European countries once the pillar of civil engagement, drag itself out of the gutter and end its poll crisis? The most important factor is of course to fully concede the mistakes of the past. Even rhetoric will go a long way in this matter, such as Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, which got the ball rolling in the public consciousness about Labour’s change of direction.
But it of course needs to be coupled with action. The development in Sweden however shows that it is not easy to convince all factions of a major social democratic party to close the borders and end the support for multiculturalism. The hard-liners on migration that exist in the party are seemingly outnumbered, and it will take a lot for a proponent of mass immigration to surrender their position, considering the current social and cultural problems in Sweden are not enough to sway them. A significant reform such as abandoning multiculturalism may require an electoral defeat, in which case we are unlikely to see a convincing shift for quite some time – the left-wing opposition in Sweden is soaring in the polls as of writing this.
The Danish Social Democrats are in a luxurious position, compared to its sister parties. It made all of these necessary changes to its policies over a decade ago, before the contradictions between traditional social democratic values and multiculturalism became too pronounced. While it would primarily be to the benefit of the social democratic movements of Europe if more parties are able to make this journey, it would also be best for Europe; these types of parties are likely to continue to influence politics for a long time to come, and it is preferable that they do it as social conservatives, rather than as multiculturalists.