Ideology and Policy

Abstract

Social democracy has faced an onslaught from the free market right in the last two decades, and the French Socialist Party has been as vulnerable to this as the other Second International parties and as ineffective in finding a reply. But although there was a near collapse of the banking system in 2008, the left’s former commitment to the state-run economy had also been dismissed. Even while Socialists elsewhere in Europe have been relatively successful in national elections, the French Socialists also face competition on the anti-capitalist left and from the extreme nationalist right over mobilising issues, and in the French case this challenge is particularly acute and includes competition from the ecologist movement, which is hostile to globalisation and ‘capitalist’ growth. Their political problem, in trying to reconcile these articulate movements, is part of the Socialist Party’s theoretical impasse, which has not been resolved and which the financial crisis of the twenty-first century has (paradoxically) done nothing to dissipate (Callaghan 2000 and Bergounioux, 2012).