AMSTERDAM — The Party of European Socialists’ top brass huddled in Amsterdam last week to take stock of their waning influence across Europe.
Apart from being an opportunity for national party leaders to meet bilaterally and rally participants with panels and speeches, the congress was framed as a grand debate on the future of social democracy.
It was also a chance for observers to do a temperature check on a political family that is hoping to claw back power in upcoming elections in the Netherlands and Sweden.
So who’s up in Socialist world, and who’s down? And what solutions were proposed to battle the far right? POLITICO reads the runes.
Winners
- Europe’s far right
The guests of honor, present on almost all panels and yet not physically in Amsterdam, were transatlantic right-wing populism and the far-right leaders surging across Europe.
“We cannot go back to that dark past, we will fight the far right with all our might,” PES President Stefan Löfven concluded, framing the struggle as social democracy’s central mission in the coming years.
In sketching out the future of social democracy, many leaders positioned it squarely against the far right, using the contrast as a roadmap for renewal. Others were more open to play within the right-wing populist terrain, giving topics such as migration and national identity a Socialist twist.
“There is an anxiety about identity, which doesn’t mean that we should take the obsession of the far right on our side, but it means we have to respond to this anxiety,” said French social democratic leader and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann. “In France, we have to say something about what it means to be French … and it will be even the opposite response to the far right, but … we have to respond to the fears that do exist.”
Romania’s Social Democratic Party will amend its statutes to change its definition of itself from “left-wing” to “center-left,” and will drop the “progressive” descriptor for attachment to the “democratic, national, religious, traditional and cultural values of the Romanian people.”
- Sánchez’s ego
During the congress, many national party leaders praised Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for boosting Spain’s economy while reducing inequality — in other words, using his policies to show that social democracy can work.
“They raise the wages, they raise the pensions, they tax the rich, they invest massively in climate transition, they invest massively and they regulate housing and they legalize thousands of migrants … and it works,” said the leader of the Belgian Walloon socialists, Paul Magnette, pointing to the success of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in polls after governing for seven years.
Sánchez received a standing ovation at the congress, with leaders tripping over each other to shake his hand as he arrived for a group photo.
In an early morning closed-door meeting on Saturday, Sánchez told his lieutenants in Brussels and beyond to be ambassadors for Spanish social democracy.
“They say we are the last bastion of social democracy in Europe, but in reality, we are the seed,” he said, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
- Workers
Many leaders agreed that the main problem with social democracy was that politicians had forgotten their roots in labor movements. They vowed to listen again to workers’ concerns and to double down on investing in the welfare state.
“We have to bring back workers at the core of our decisions … Workers now vote for [the] far right and that’s a harsh truth … because choices that were made were to the disadvantage of workers,” Glucksmann said.
The party doubled down on social democracy’s mainstays — health care, job creation, affordable housing and renewable energy — as the core of its campaign program.
Losers
- Migrants
The Socialists were unable to agree on how to tackle migration. The party kept mum on the topic in its congress resolutions and campaign plans, although many leaders locked horns on the issue when it was brought up during panels.
During a debate on Saturday, Swedish Social Democratic Party chief Magdalena Andersson said her party’s key to success in the polls has been to get tough on migration.
“We are way stricter on migration and on crime than we were before, because of the situation in Sweden, we took more refugees than any other European countries during the crisis [in] 2015,” Andersson said. “We have a lot of shootings, we have to take this [seriously], we are much tougher on crime than we were before.”
Italian Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein, who promotes a humanitarian approach to migration with a focus on inclusion rather than deportations, seemed to rebuff Andersson, arguing the Socialists can’t defeat the far right “by running after their agenda.”
Similarly, Sánchez said during a speech: “To be credible, we must also remain loyal to our principles, we cannot accept the far right’s frameworks, we cannot renounce our convictions for the sake of political convenience.”
- Actual voting
Everything the congress was meant to vote on had already been decided beforehand behind closed doors, with many of the attendees seeing the gathering as a talking shop.
Löfven was reelected president by ballot on Friday night unopposed. His team of vice presidents remains largely unchanged and was agreed on by party leaders behind closed doors during a dinner and without an open contest or vote.
Delegates also rubber-stamped membership and policy resolutions with an informal show of hands — no roll call, no records kept and no one counting the votes. The setup left little room for dissent in public, and even less for accountability.
- Smer
The Socialists also kicked out Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer party. (Its membership was previously suspended in October 2023 and its MEPs were ejected from the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament.)
“If they want to punish us because we have defined marriage as a unique union between a man and a woman, that we said there are only two sexes and that we said that in these issues our law takes precedence over European law, if that’s why we have to be expelled, then it’s an honor for us,” AP reported Fico as saying in reaction to the expulsion.
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