Burnt Out

By THOMAS SANCTON PARIS

TIRED AND ILL WITH PROSTATE CANcer, Francois Mitterrand sat silently in a Louis XV armchair at the Elysee Palace, watching election returns. Was it only a dozen years ago that a vigorous Mitterrand, newly elected as France's Socialist President, marched solemnly up the steps of the Pantheon and placed red roses on the tombs of three leftist heroes while the streets of Paris rang with victory celebrations? Now as the results of last week's parliamentary vote flickered across the TV screen, the numbers confirmed what all had suspected: the Socialist era was over in France. Mitterrand's party had been swamped by a right-wing tidal wave that swept up 460 of the 577 National Assembly seats and confronted the lame-duck President with the most lopsided conservative majority since the monarchy was restored in 1815.

The French election may well have signaled the final act in the history of West European socialism, whose roots, like the very notion of left and right politics, go back to the French Revolution. From Stockholm to Rome, from Lisbon to Bonn, socialist and social-democratic movements are in trouble. The Italian party is entangled in financial scandals that prompted Bettino Craxi's resignation as chairman and may put dozens of members behind bars. In Spain, Felipe Gonzalez's party could well face defeat in elections later this year. Britain's Labour Party has been unable to win a national election in 14 years, while Germany's Social Democratic Party has been frozen out of government since 1982. In Scandinavia, the long-ruling Social Democrats were ousted from power in the mid-1980s, but they have recently regained power in Denmark and Sweden, where their main task will be to trim back their own greatest achievement: the welfare state.

The challenges facing all these movements run far deeper than electoral miseries. The collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe exposed the bankruptcy of the collectivist doctrines that lay at the heart of all socialist thought. "Socialism is a dirty word today," says French sociologist Alain Touraine. The French and Italian socialist parties are even considering changing their names to avoid the opprobrium that voters attach to them.

The crisis began building long before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The fundamental problem is that an ideology based on 19th century industrial relations has lost its meaning in a world where the nature of class and work has changed. The conditions that gave birth to socialism have ceased to exist. The improved lot of European workers -- rising prosperity, upward social mobility, increased access to property -- has lifted most of them into the middle class and deprived socialist parties of their natural electoral base. "As a result of economic changes, the working class all over the West has been shrinking since the 1960s," says Oxford University lecturer Vernon ) Bogdanor. "The old icons, the old ideology are outmoded." That leads some observers to pronounce the movement dead. "It's finished," says French social philosopher Jean-Francois Revel. "It was a great intellectual adventure that turned out to be a historical parenthesis."

A more charitable view is that the European left is a victim of its own success. "The socialist program was established at the end of the last century," says Jacques Julliard, a professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. "Most of it has now been achieved: social security systems, raising the lowest salaries, reducing inequalities."

Most European socialist parties have long since dropped their Marxist class- struggle ideology and evolved into social-democratic movements that embrace the electoral process and accommodate themselves to a capitalist economy. The French left's failure to make such changes is instructive. Mitterrand came to power in 1981 by forming an alliance with the communists on the basis of a program that called for sweeping nationalization of industry and generous worker benefits. Runaway inflation and three devaluations of the franc forced the Socialists to make a sharp right turn in 1983, and they have basically pursued free-market policies ever since -- without ever formally renouncing their Marxist principles.

In the same decade, Britain's Labour Party, long one of Europe's most rabidly anticapitalist movements, undertook a nine-year effort to purge radicals from key party positions and to appeal to a mainstream electorate -- so far to little avail. Labour's problem is that it has not fully abandoned its anticapitalist rhetoric. That has made voters permanently skeptical about the party's true intentions.

Not all the left's problems spring from this ideological predicament. The French and Spanish parties, both in power for roughly a decade, are paying the political price for recession and rising unemployment. Scandals have eroded the strength of socialist parties in Spain, France and Greece, as well as Italy. European socialists have also been victims of a disaffection with party politics that seem out of touch with people's real concerns and problems. In last week's French elections, nearly one-third of the voters abstained.

In moving toward the center, the socialists have ceased to represent an alternative to the system. On many points, their policies are now virtually identical with those of the right: budgetary discipline, privatization, low inflation, free trade. That may be sound economics, notes Julliard, "but if the left has no other perspective than growth and monetary stability, why should anyone vote Socialist today?"

Some hard-liners, like left-wing Labour M.P. Tony Benn, argue for a return to old-fashioned "socialist principles." Most of these parties, however, are desperately seeking to reinvent themselves. In an explosive speech last February, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, the Socialists' presumed presidential candidate in 1995, pronounced the old party dead and called for a "political big bang" that would create a new constellation of socialists, reform-minded communists, centrists and human-rights activists. Last weekend Rocard's supporters ousted party chairman Laurent Fabius and placed Rocard at the head of a "collective leadership."

Others are seeking to redefine socialism itself. Michel Charzat, a French party official, believes that the left must launch a "project to reconstruct a society in which citizens come together, discuss, deliberate, make compromises." What the people are looking for, he says, are "pragmatic responses to their concerns." Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the Portuguese party, calls for "new solutions to new problems" and points to examples such as job sharing as a possible answer to unemployment.

None of these approaches are very precise, but they have one thing in common: a retreat from ideology. The main lesson of the French elections, says philosopher Andre Glucksmann, is "the end of the religious, theological, ideological style of politics" that the Socialists represented. "Voters no longer believe in definitive, global solutions. They want politics to address real problems." He sees French politics evolving into an American-style two- party system, in which a liberal and a conservative camp would address issues free from the "dogmatic Utopianism" that once clouded their debates. At a time when many Europeans see the Clinton Administration moving toward a social-democratic approach, with its emphasis on national health care and industrial policy, that raises the fascinating prospect of two very different systems converging on the same principle: using the power of the state to put people first.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Bonn, William Mader/London and John Moody/Rome