Socialist Parties in Europe Keep Losing for the Same Reason

It's clear after Sunday's election in Germany that the electoral failures of established socialist parties in Europe are not a few isolated events but a trend, an existential crisis for the center-left.

There are few better illustrations of this crisis than Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz's futile anger at Chancellor Angela Merkel in the aftermath of Sunday's election. Schulz called her "the biggest loser" of the race; he chastised her for "a systematic evasion of politics" that created a vacuum for nationalists to step in and declared her feel-good campaign "scandalous." He made it sound as though it was Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Union governed with his SPD for the last four years, who caused his party to show its worst ever election result -- just 20.5 percent of the vote. Considering that he'd campaigned against her, and that she's won the election, Schulz's charges sounded surreal. Clearly, he has no clue what happened to his party's support, just as French Socialists had no idea why their backing collapsed in the run-up to this year's presidential election, and just as the Dutch Labour Party struggled to comprehend its electoral implosion in March.