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After the elections in Germany, there’s been a lot of talking about the success of the far right. The conservative CDU did advance and will be able to form a government, but the electoral success was stopped by the radical right-wing AFD.
But it should also be noted that the ruling German Social Democrats went sharply backwards and that this confirms a tendency that we also see in the rest of Europe. The political left has no answers to the questions that currently characterize European politics. And when they get the chance to rule, they fail.
In Germany, the Social Democrats under the leadership of Olaf Schultz went back from 25.7 percent of the vote in the 2021 election to 16.4 percent in 2025. After only a few years of rule, the voters clearly showed what they thought of the German Social Democrats. In Britain, Labor rules. But that’s because the Tories had disintegrated after 14 years in power and because the British right is divided between the traditional right-wing Tories and their challengers Reform UK. However, it should be noted that the Labor government is already extremely unpopular and enjoys record low voter support in the opinion polls. In a survey conducted on February 23-24, 22 percent of Britons say they support Labor, while twice as many support one of the two conservative parties – Tories 22 percent, Reform UK 25 percent.
In Sweden, the Swedish Social Democrats ruled between 2014 and 2022. In the 2022 election, they declared on their election posters that “Sweden can do better”. The party thus more or less openly admitted that its policies had been bad for Sweden. The voters seemed to agree and voted in a right-wing government. The last socialist president of France, François Hollande, ruled from 2012 to 2017. He failed so completely in his ambition to reduce unemployment that he did not even stand for re-election. Instead, it was the enterprising Emmanuel Macron who became president after he himself broke with the Socialist Party and created his own centrist political movement.
The basic problem for the political left in Europe is that history right now calls for a conservative reset of Western society. Europe needs political leaders who can tackle illegal migration, who take crime seriously and who dare to start talking about European culture and identity again. In addition, we need political leaders who dare to stand up against the centralizing tendencies we see from Brussels. The European economy is lagging right now. And if we are to believe all the classic national economic theories about how wealth is created, less regulation and more freedom for European companies is required if we are to keep up with Asia and the US.
Europe therefore needs a balanced combination between value conservatism and market thinking. We Europeans must be ourselves, but we must also be inventive and competitive. Culture, identity, law and order, traditions, but also market economy. All this is needed. And it is hardly the parties on the left who can fix it. Which, among other things, the political development in Germany in recent times so clearly shows.
Unfortunately, we must admit that right-wing parties have also lost their way. The Tories in the UK have proved unable to deal with post-Brexit migration and are therefore now losing support to Reform UK. The Christian Democrats in Germany also opened to far too much unregulated migration and decided that Europe’s largest industrial nation should phase out all nuclear power. In Sweden – a country that the undersigned knows well – it was similarly a traditional right-wing government that in the early 2010s deregulated migration and released control over who entered the country.
In these three countries right-wing governments have been punished by the voters. The voters’ problem, however, is that the left-wing governments they got instead proved unable to deal with the problems that people wanted solved. And that is simply because it is not socialism, social democracy or any other form of left-wing radicalism that is the solution to the problems we now have in Europe but conservative right-wing politics. Let’s take a few examples to show why.
Socialists love public ownership. They therefore also love public governance. Including management of finances. And here the EU system, which was once intended to function only as a free trade zone – has tended to run the errands of the economic left. Because when the EU, via Corona funds and other tools for the redistribution of resources, starts to control what Europe’s economies should invest their capital in, then the economy risks losing efficiency. If investors and industrialists become more interested in accessing grant money than investing their own risk capital, then the market economy will not work as efficiently.
Socialists and leftists in general (especially environmentalists) also love moral pointers. Politics must step in and realize equality, social justice and climate smartness. Politics must therefore step in and ensure that the economy operates in accordance with the ethics of the left. It is of course reasonable that the business world should also contribute in its own way to social progress and to the necessary considerations towards the environment. But when left-wing politicians want to step in and control the business world too much, it will ultimately cost in terms of competitiveness and prosperity. And that’s what we’re seeing right now. We need to free up market force instead of weighing it down with even more regulations.
It is also in the left’s DNA to fight social “injustices”. This makes it very difficult for social democratic governments to deal with the structural societal problems that are created or at least exacerbated by a large-scale reception of refugees. In Sweden, an attention-grabbing report came in 2020 from a business organization called “Entreprenörskapsforum” where it was shown that the part of the Swedish population that was born outside Sweden’s borders had a much lower degree of self-sufficiency than the average Swede. We speak here of “degree of employment” and of “degree of self-sufficiency”. This means that people who have a job can still be unable to support themselves because the salary is not enough for living expenses and for the costs of any children. And the low degree of self-sufficiency applied above all to all the migrants who came to Sweden from the Middle East and Africa:
“In 2016, the employment rate for domestically born people (including individuals born in the Nordics) was 89 percent, while the self-sufficiency rate was 73 percent. The corresponding figures for individuals born in Africa were 68 percent and 38 percent respectively, and for the Middle East 56 percent and 36 percent respectively. This means that the self-sufficiency rate for certain groups of foreign-born is roughly 30 percentage points lower than for domestic-born.”
These are problems that can be solved by restricting types of immigration which quite obviously leads to economic problems. But also, by pursuing a new and more demanding economic policy. If there were clearer requirements for self-sufficiency to stay in Sweden, it would be possible to get these numbers up. Less responsibility for the public, then, and more for the individual himself.
But these are reforms that Europe’s left-wing parties are unable to implement. They are stuck in their outdated ideological rhetoric where politics first of all should aim to redress injustice. The political business idea of the left is to stop injustice, and this thinking makes it impossible to make the demands that need to be made for people to be allowed to immigrate and for them to be allowed to stay.
It is not strange at all that Europe’s left-wing parties are currently either losing elections or making themselves unpopular. We need something completely different from the politics they want to see. We need a market economy, a strengthened European identity, a reformed migration policy and, above all, a real acceptance of responsibility for our common future.