Krise der europäischen Linken

...leaving behind the left's traditional laissez-faire multiculturalism that has failed in the past.

But the biggest dilemma is that most parties on the left have not figured out how to adapt their old welfare-statist ideologies to modern economic realities—while appealing to voters who see modern reform as a betrayal of their parties' traditional socialist ideals, and who often have more-extreme left-wing parties to turn to.

Their inheritance as class-based parties has kept alive a powerful myth of class treachery and betrayal if they try to cooperate with the right.

[They have to accept] a certain reality about the way the world works...

the SPD, like France's Socialists or Italy's leftist parties, "never made its peace with capitalism and the market economy, nor the competition and inequalities that go with it." That's why for the SPD, national government has always ended in disaster, producing self-destructive party schisms whenever holding power confronted it with the uncomfortable reality that much of what it had promised voters was not only unaffordable, but destructive to the economy as well.

Newsweek Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, Tracy McNicoll in Paris and William Underhill in London