GÜNTER GRASS, an enthusiast for the centre-left ideas of Willy Brandt, chronicled the slow post-war rise of social democracy in an elegant memoir called “From the Diary of a Snail”. The creature struck the writer as an apt metaphor for that school of thought. It was unhurried but purposeful: a “politics of small progressions”, defying setbacks and promising moderation. It avoided both the reactionary tendencies of many conservative movements, and the revolutionary posturing of the far left.
But the snail is stuck. In recent years, governments of the centre-right have eclipsed their rivals in elections across Europe. Strikingly, parties of the centre-left have failed to capitalise on the most profound crisis in capitalism brought by the financial crash of 2007-08. Far from seizing the opportunity to win an argument for greater state regulation and a less intense embrace of free-markets, the left has been swept out of power in many places and found it hard to return.
In Germany Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic chancellor, has been in office since 2005. In Britain a Tory-led government has held power since 2010, and the twice-…
