Opportunities Lost

Socialist Medicine
The Party of European Socialists (PES) kicked off its eighth congress in Prague last Monday, the same day the Copenhagen climate summit started.

While to a certain extent the socialists hitched their wagons to the higher-profile affair to the north by publicizing their effort at holding a “carbon-free” event, the main effect has been that of relegating the congress to the back pages of the news. This was the first time a top-level party congress was held in one of the EU’s New Member States. According to PES general secretary Philip Cordery the choice of Prague was chosen to support the electoral bid of the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) ahead of next year’s elections.

The publicized arrival at the site of the congress of the head of the CSSD Jirí Paroubek, PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and a number of other party leaders following a three-stop tram ride was meant to represent the event’s reduced carbon footprint and the seriousness with which Europe’s socialists take environmental issues. But beyond issuing an appeal supporting firm negotiations in Copenhagen nothing significantly new was presented regarding European environmental policy.

The other centerpiece of PES policy is support of increased financial regulation and reform of the capital markets. In his opening speech however Rasmussen admitted that the European left had missed an opportunity. “Overall, people are not convinced that the financial crisis is a failure of right-wing ideology. And they are not convinced that we have a credible alternative,” Rasmussen said, bemoaning electoral failure of socialist parties in European elections and blaming what he referred to as the “sofa party,” or voter apathy for the disappointing results. While acknowledging that new steps and initiatives were needed to get the socialist message across though Rasmussen’s own re-election to another five-year term as PES President represented the continuity of the assembled and, at times, dissimilar parties.

One national party which found itself again included in the European socialist mix was Slovakia’s largest governing party Smer-Social Democracy (Smer-SD) of Prime Minister Robert Fico. Smer was suspended from PES in 2006 after forming a coalition government with the right-wing Slovak National Party (SNS). PES members voted 93 percent in favor of readmitting the Slovak party in spite of its continued coalition with the SNS. The Belgian and Hungarian parties remained opposed.

While Smer is now expected to try to garner mainstream prestige by showing themselves as part of a Europe-wide movement the host party CSSD also defined its own benefits from being a part of a larger whole. “Those claiming that we are worse than communists or that we are a sort of crypto-communists will have it worse now,” Paroubek said, according to the Czech News Agency (CTK).

Karl Marx was unavailable for comment.

Via Czech Business Weekly