What Jeremy Corbyn can teach the left in Europe

Jeremy Corbyn will declare himself prime minister-in-waiting Wednesday — and nobody will laugh.

کد خبر: ۷۳۳۸۴۹

تاریخ: ۰۵ مهر ۱۳۹۶ - ۰۸:۳۴

In major Western democracies, Corbyn’s Labour stands out as the one (relative) success story on the left, defying the electoral decline seen this year in the Netherlands, then in France and finally, on Sunday, in Germany, where the once mighty Social Democrats finished with just 20 percent of the vote. Across the Atlantic in the U.S., the traditional center-left is also suffering.

In Brighton, however, where Labour gathered for its annual conference this week, the left of the party is fully in control, buoyed by a surprise surge in support in June’s general election, and convinced it is on the path to power. According to the polls, they are right. Since the election, in which the party secured 30 more seats but failed to achieve an overall majority, Labour has overtaken the Tories, moving four points clear according to the latest Ipsos MORI poll published over the weekend.

In his set-piece speech to party activists Wednesday, Corbyn will claim the country has "put the Tories on notice and Labour on the threshold of power,” according to extracts released overnight. "Yes, we didn’t do quite well enough and we remain in opposition for now,” he will say. "But we have become a government-in-waiting.”

Not many socialist parties are able to say that with a straight face right now.

After two years in charge, Corbyn is dominant — the party of Tony "New Labour” Blair is no more. The Blairite right of the party appears all-but vanquished, unable to match Corbyn supporters’ sheer strength of numbers — of the 1,200 delegates from constituency Labour parties who have made their way to the south coast for the conference, 70 percent are Corbynistas, leading party officials estimate.

Activists have been showing off this strength all week. On Monday they mobilized to deny the right of the party a potentially embarrassing vote on Brexit. Rule changes to tighten the left’s grip on the party have also been agreed without opposition.

As Corbyn prepares to take the stage Wednesday afternoon, with his wife Laura watching from the audience, he has a claim to be the most powerful left-wing leader in Europe.

How did we get here and what should the rest of Europe learn from Labour’s success in the U.K.? Here are 5 lessons from a week by the sea with Jeremy Corbyn — and one note of caution.

Mold an outsider

"What’s happened to Jeremy Corbyn that he can’t answer my question,” demanded a frustrated Andrew Marr in the BBC’s traditional big TV interview setting up conference season on Sunday.

Corbyn was obfuscating, as politicians do, but that’s not what he’s supposed to do. His appeal lies in the fact that he isn’t a normal politician — he’s "a straight talker,” in Marr’s words.

On Sunday, Corbyn wouldn’t take the bait, refusing to say whether he would join U.K. workers on picket lines if they went out on strike illegally this winter. But this isn’t a sign that he has mellowed, it’s just an indication that he is getting smarter. The Labour leader didn’t give Marr the argument he wanted, calmly repeating his line that he supported public sector workers getting a pay rise.

Corbyn’s substance was the same and just as radical as before — promising to increase the size of the state and even giving the old-fashioned, Euroskeptic left’s criticism of the single market. It was radicalism without the gaffes.

"He’s like Uber,”said one senior Labour aide. "He’s a disrupter, who’s come in and shook up a stale old system.”

His message on stage on Wednesday afternoon will retain a radical edge, offering the country policies and ideology they have not had for decades — socialism, red in tooth and claw.

New restrictions will be imposed on business, executive pay curtailed and automated industries put to work for the good of society as directed by the state, according to the extracts of his speech released to the media.

Embrace digital

In the conference hall this week, old hands have noticed a new phenomenon. Instead of clutching bits of yellow paper handed out at the conference gates, with typed-up notes from rival factions of the party outlining how to vote on motions during the day, hundreds of delegates are now staring at their iPhones.

Momentum, the pro-Corbyn group credited with much of his success campaigning on social media, has developed its own app, firing out push notifications to activists telling them which votes are coming up and how they should cast their ballot.

It is streets ahead of anything any other faction is doing, officials from all wings of the party — pro- and anti-Corbyn — say.

While Corbyn’s closest aides admit that their embrace of technology, and particularly social media, is not the reason millions more people voted Labour in June, they say it is an important aspect of their success.

"It’s all based on social networks,” one senior Corbyn aide said. "It’s how to do digital activism. There is more trust.”

It is just the latest development in the online war. Labour won the social media campaign during the election because they focused on motivating their own supporters rather than attacking their opponents, digital strategists for both sides told the Guardian.

Rage against the machine

Corbyn’s inner circle view Martin Schulz’s general election campaign with disdain.

The German Social Democrat leader’s offer to the electorate was summed up by one Corbyn campaign insider as: "Agree with [Angela] Merkel on everything but challenge her from the right on asylum. Madness.”

Corbyn’s senior lieutenants believe the key to success is populist insurgency.

"The most viable form of opposition politics right now is both anti-austerity and anti-systemic,” one senior Labour official said.

The left must show voters there are "fundamental differences” between its vision of society and the right’s, the official said. "It’s no good just saying they are not very nice. You cannot shy away from conflict and controversy when you’re on the side where the people are.”

A new third way

The Brexit referendum split Labour as it did the country, with many Remain-supporting MPs representing constituencies, especially in the north of England, where the vast majority of voters backed Leave.

"There’s just no way Tony Blair in 1997 would be saying what Tony Blair of today is saying,” said one weary Labour MP from the moderate center-right of the party who campaigned to stay in the European Union but represents a northern seat that backed Brexit.

Blair’s call to arms on Europe is being headed by Labour’s remaining "moderates” — a group of MPs who are uniting under the banner of continued membership of the single market, which would require continued free movement of people.

"They’re like the new hard left,” said one party official sympathetic to their cause. "It’s back to ‘no compromise with the voters!’ It’s unsustainable.”

On Brexit, Corbyn has cast himself as the moderate, many Labour MPs from Leave-supporting areas believe, picking a path between hard and soft Brexit, accepting Britain must leave the single market to "take back control” of setting regulations, and curtailing freedom of movement.

Put the coalition back together

Corbyn has reassembled an electoral coalition between the metropolitan left and the working class, which has withered away in many other European democracies.

Corbyn’s appeal has undermined rival left-wing parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, swelling Labour’s ranks in areas such as Brighton, without incurring a significant loss of support in former industrial heartland seats in the north and midlands, according to the British Election Study, which has examined the results of the election.

"The coalition is key,” said one Corbyn aide. "You have to build it back up. That’s what we managed to do and it’s the same in Europe. You can’t do it just as the center-left, you need the left as well.”

Corbyn’s aides say that Portugal, the one other country which has seen left-wing success, has managed to defy the trend of socialist decline by uniting the hard left, center left and liberal environmental movement, and this is the only route to power.

Beware British exceptionalism

Not all Labour MPs are convinced their socialist sister parties have much to learn from Corbyn’s populist experiment.

Writing in the New Statesman, Bridget Phillipson MP pointed out that Labour did not win the election and claimed that it is "testament to the astonishingly low expectations people had for Labour in this election that being 60 or so seats short of an absolute majority, and almost a hundred seats short of our last election-winning performance in 2005, has somehow been cast as a triumph.”

Corbyn defied expectations to finish a good second in June. But the conditions for such a result are hard, if not impossible, to replicate elsewhere. Britain had just voted to leave the European Union, a decision which cast the election as a choice between competing visions of Brexit, while destroying a major political force in UKIP, which had acted as a magnet for Labour’s traditional supporter base. Corbyn also benefited from an electoral system that rewards the two main parties — which are in effect coalitions of smaller factions formed before an election rather than after — as is largely the case on the Continent.

With Theresa May’s Tories touching 50 percent in the polls, voters from the left had little choice but to vote for Labour.