Is Germany’s election result a sign the left is making a comeback in Europe? Opinion is already polarised

Almost two weeks on, the results of the agonisingly close German election are settling down. Talks have begun between the centre-left Social Democrats on the one hand and the Greens and the free-market Free Democrats on the other. The likely outcome will be a so-called “traffic light” coalition: red (the SPD), yellow (the FDP) and green. The SPD candidate, Olaf Scholz, will succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor.

Merkel’s centre-right CDU/CSU alliance, meanwhile, is in disarray, with its lead candidate, Armin Laschet, blamed for a lacklustre campaign and squandering not only an election that looked to be his to win but – worse – the whole Merkel bequest. If it once seemed that his better-than-expected performance on election day might have given him a shot at forming a coalition, that looks an even more remote prospect now than it did then.

Not that it will be easy for Scholz to form a coalition. The Greens stand very far to the left on social and economic issues, while the FDP defends low taxes and the interests of business, especially small business. In the end, the direction of Germany’s new government will not be entirely clear until the policy compromises have been hammered out and the government portfolios have been distributed.

I would nonetheless risk one bet. A Scholz-led traffic-light coalition, if that is what emerges, will see Germany’s centre-left in the ascendant. The FDP may keep it from the furthest reaches of the Greens’ egalitarian agenda, but the FDP will be the odd party out; the majority will be SPD-Green. And although the SPD, like the CDU, gravitates to the centre, the difference between the likely new coalition and the previous Grand (centre-right, centre-left) Coalition in which Scholz was finance minister and deputy chancellor could be much sharper than the very close election result might warrant.

Germany could be looking at a substantial rise in the minimum wage; efforts to extend the “levelling up” there have been between the former West and the former East to areas of many German cities, and a new emphasis on education, with efforts to renew and modernise technical education in schools and modernise Germany’s universities. Climate will be a priority, with likely arguments about who will foot the bill (taxpayers or business), what to do about Germany’s car industry, and the feasibility of simultaneously eliminating both nuclear and coal-fired power.

It could be argued that many of these changes fit into a modernisation agenda which both major parties committed themselves to during the election campaign. There was a shared recognition that Germany had stagnated in many ways over the past decade. But a Scholz-led coalition will have a distinctly left-ish tinge, and it will be the first time the left – all right, the centre-left – will be in Germany’s driving seat since Gerhard Schroeder called, and lost, an early election in 2005.

And this plays into a bigger argument. Is the shift taking place in Germany – a shift that, it has to be said, had not been expected at the start of the election campaign last spring, when the SPD had been practically written off as in terminal decline – just a one-off reaction to 16 years of Merkel, or is it more significant? And if it is, could it be part of a wider shift in political sentiment, in Europe or even across the industrialised world as a whole?

Opinion is already as polarised on this as it is on almost everything else. For everyone who detects the first flags of a new leftist dawn, there is someone else who dismisses that view as wishful thinking at best and, at worst, nostalgia on the part of a generation of politicians and intellectuals that is fading, along with its ideas?

Let me stress at the outset, I have no dog in this fight; I try to keep a sceptical distance, from politics as from power. But it does seem to me that the left, having been categorically written off – not least after Labour’s swingeing defeat at the last UK general election – could be enjoying a bit of a moment, and that it is premature to consign all the volumes of leftish ideas to the proverbial dustbin of history.

With Norway’s election of a Labour-led coalition last month, all Scandinavia and Finland now have governments of the centre-left. So do Spain and Portugal. In France, Emmanuel Macron was elected four years ago in preference to both the centre-right Republican candidate, Francois Fillon, and the further right Marine Le Pen, and is expected to see off his main rivals from the right in elections next April. In Italy, which has a government of national unity led by Mario Draghi, centrist and centre-left candidates won against right-wing candidates in recent mayoral elections.

Not to be forgotten either is Joe Biden’s victory against Donald Trump in last year’s US presidential election, and the fact that he has since pursued domestic policies, whether on efforts to revitalise the economy or to cope with the pandemic, that would be seen as centre-left in character in Europe, let alone in the United States (where the political mainstream tends to be further to the right than it is here). I would also add the unexpectedly strong performance of the Communist Party in Russia’s recent parliamentary elections, campaigning on a platform of social equity and opposition to corruption.

Now there are caveats. Just a few results favouring the right or the centre-right in the coming year could discredit any suggestion of a wider international trend to the left. What is more, the voting in many countries – Germany now included – has been very finely balanced between left and right, which makes for close elections and very small shifts making the difference between a party retaining or losing power.

Plus, in Italy, there is an argument that recent gains for the centre-left need to be seen in the context of a lower vote overall, for all parties. And this could be explained by a sense of disillusionment with the compromises made by what were once seen as “alternative” or “populist” parties, such as the Five Star Movement and the Lega Nord, when in, or sharing, power. In other words, if there had been a real alternative, Italian voters might have supported it; instead, they stayed at home. For the same reason, it seems to me, it is far, far too early to see any revival of the left, if that is what we are seeing, as evidence that the appeal of “populism” has diminished, just because Trump is out and others of his ilk, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban may be weakened.

On the other hand, there are also compelling reasons why voters across the industrialised world might be taking another look at the left, whether the centre-left, as in Germany and the Nordic countries today, or – as in Russia last month and, yes, the UK’s 2017 general election – the further left.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 was a traumatic time that perhaps left more enduring scars – in the adverse effects of quantitative easing, the legacy of “austerity”, and enduring resentment towards banks and bankers – than has been realised. Then there has been the pandemic, which has highlighted inequality of all kinds across the developed world – and the possibility, thanks to modern communications, for people to compare the performance of their own governments and health systems with those of other countries in real time.

The social ills amplified by the pandemic and the long-term effects of the Euro crisis were both themes in the recent German elections. But they are hardly exclusive to Germany; they cross borders. Which is why I am not convinced that the Corbynism that drew so many especially young people to rallies four years ago has been quashed, as opposed to temporarily stifled by the centrism of Keir Starmer. Starmer, in fact, could be in more difficulty than his counterparts across the Channel, because Boris Johnson has gone quite a way towards co-opting policies on investment, education and social equity that could otherwise have been his.

The next test of where the industrialised world is headed politically will probably be the French presidential elections next spring. Whether Macron decides to campaign from the left or the right could say something about his judgement on that score well before the results are in.