An Irish Party Foresees Its Death
Caldwell, Christopher
An Irish Party Foresees Its Death Fine Gael falls—like other center-left parties across Europe. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL LAST WEEK'S IRISH ELECTIONS were supposed to provide a measuring stick for...
...If Ireland's xenophobes are exhibiting any comradely dynamism at present, it's only because the entire movement can be assembled in the same living room...
...The fiction persists, of course, that there is no link between the terrorist IRA and its "political wing," Sinn Fein...
...Like a waterfowl diving for fish (a loon, maybe...
...Why does public opinion look the other way when German Social Democrats form local coalitions with the ex-Communists...
...So are we witnessing a collapse of the Old World left...
...The center-right Christian Democrats became the country's largest party, increasing their representation by 50 percent, while Prime Minister Wim Kok's Labour/Liberal coalition got its worst result since 1945, losing 37 of its 83 seats...
...Au contraire...
...The real opposition were the Greens and Sinn Fein . . . ," said Green member of the European Parliament Patricia McKenna...
...Kok's Labour party has done more than a pretty good job—it has made the Dutch economy the envy of Europe...
...Palestine, not the bond market, is the issue of the day...
...And yet the two leading candidates of the newly formed Immigration Control Platform didn't exactly have a banner day, drawing under a thousand votes apiece...
...The two main tendencies in the left's reconstitution are environmen-talism (the Greens) and radical anti-capitalism (Sinn Fein...
...Just as extraordinary as the late For-tuyn's showing was the disappearance of the economy as an issue...
...the left has been invisible for long enough that one could assume it's drowned...
...In the days after the vote, it was Sinn Fein that called aggressively for a union of the parties of the "broad left," and its initiatives were met with some sympathy...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL LAST WEEK'S IRISH ELECTIONS were supposed to provide a measuring stick for the wave of right-wing xenophobia that commentators warn is sweeping Europe...
...The link between Gerry Adams and the IRA is the same as that between Yasser Arafat and the Al Aksa martyrs...
...The latter seems to be gaining the upper hand...
...Take Germany...
...Spurred by a decade of dynamic growth, the country now has immigrants—tens of thousands of Balkan refugees and African laborers—for the first time in the modern era...
...Heading into this fall's elecChristopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...For weeks now, commentators at Britain's Guardian and France's Le Monde have been dumbstruck at the inability of left parties to "seize the center" of the electorate...
...In 1998, the right-wing German People's party (DVU) took 12 percent A resurgent left that held 13 of 15 European governments in the late 1990s today holds fewer than half of them...
...and the Irish Republican terrorist party, Sinn Fein, which went from 1 seat to 5. Imagine: In the wake of September 11, in what has for a decade been the most booming economy in Europe, a terrorist party triples its vote to 6.5 percent...
...such Clinton-style moderates as the former finance ministers Dominique strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius have been relieved of their leading roles...
...A rising center-right tide doesn't necessarily lift far-right boats...
...It had taken 19 percent of a municipal vote in Hamburg—nerve center of the World Trade Center bomb plot—in the first days after September 11...
...The ex-Communist Party of Democratic socialism (PDs), in its day the most stalinist party in Eastern Europe, is now Germany's second party in parts of the former East (including sachsen-Anhalt...
...But Schill struggled to pull a mere 4 percent...
...The upshot of Ireland's elections is the same as that of the other three held in Europe in recent weeks, namely that the center left fell to pieces...
...The country's most overtly Blairite politician, Ruairi Quinn, saw his Labour party hold its seats, but lose about a fifth of its popular vote...
...So it may be wise to take the rise of the right in recent Dutch elections as a special case...
...A new law-and-order party headed by Judge Ronald Schill had high hopes...
...For years, European bien-pensants have cast the hard right as distinct from the center right for purposes of coalition-forming (Jacques Chirac must not only denounce the National Front but repudiate its supporters), but indistinguishable for the purposes of guilt by association (French Socialists march not just against the Italian hard right but against Silvio Berlusconi as well...
...Real wages have grown by a quarter, and unemployment has fallen to low single digits, under Kok's premiership...
...Michael Noonan of Fine Gael, Ireland's limousine-liberal party, kept looking for tiny clouds in the radiant sky of the country's economic expansion, warning that Ireland was heading towards a "culture of selfishness...
...But why is there no stigma attached to voting for the IRA, who a decade ago were eviscerating pedestrians with plastic explosives...
...It turns out that the European left's problem with centrist voters is that it doesn't particularly want them in the first place...
...The hard left, meanwhile, is indistinguishable from the left for purposes of coalition-forming (ex-Communists have helped govern in Paris and still do in Berlin) but distinct for the purposes of guilt by association (Jospin was never asked to repudiate France's powerful Trotskyite vote...
...radicals, such as the former labor minister Martine Aubry, have taken their place...
...For one thing, the late rightist candidate Pim Fortuyn made a steady effort to distance himself from the racism of France's Jean-Marie Le Pen...
...Similarly, Premier Lionel Jospin's solid economic record in France, while not quite as impressive as Kok's, was one for which no American politician would ever have been voted out of office...
...In Ireland, the big story is that Fine Gael voters fled to two newer, more radical left parties: the Greens, who now hold 6 parliamentary seats...
...And Sinn Fein's victory came just weeks after revelations that IRA experts formed the nucleus of a virtual Academy of International Terrorism sponsored by the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces...
...tions, the Bavarian conservative Edmund Stoiber leads Socialist premier Gerhard Schröder by nine points in the polls...
...The slightly rightish Fianna Fail prime minister Bertie Ahern combined economic growth and a tough crime program to win 81 seats (4 more than last time) in the country's 165-seat lower house...
...And in April's SachsenAnhalt state elections, the news got even worse for Schröder...
...But look carefully and you will see it resurfacing somewhere hundreds of yards away...
...His party lost 23 of the 54 seats it had held—its worst result in 50 years...
...European politicians consider Le Pen an untouchable because his oratory resembles that of Vichy collaborationists...
...Fair enough...
...Less noted was that the hard right collapsed, too...
...Christian Democrats saw their tally rise from 22 to 37 percent, while the Socialists dropped to just 20 percent, landing as the region's third party...
...There—off to the far left...
...Regarding the major parties, results in the Netherlands followed the pattern of Ireland, France, and Germany...
...But this year the DVU didn't even field candidates...
...And note the way, after its presidential loss, France's socialist party is rejiggering itself to fight June's legislative elections...
...We need to build on our successes now...
...One Europe-wide casualty of the latest wave of elections may be the ideological double standard that has been in force for several years...
...But the convicted gunrunner Martin Ferris, who defeated a former foreign secretary to win his seat for Sinn Fein, sits on the IRA's Army Council...
...For another, Fortuyn's assassination on May 6 unleashed a huge sympathy vote that may not be reproducible...
...A resurgent left that held 13 of 15 European governments in the late 1990s today holds fewer than half of them...
...of the vote in Sachsen-Anhalt...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 37
