What Happened to European Social Democracy?

It has imploded. America's blue states need to take note.

Looking left: Michael Harrington and me, circa 1982.

European social democracy is dying in almost every large country it once ruled. Yet the model isn't dead so much as displaced: America's blue states have quietly built something close to European social democracy, funded precariously by taxes on the rich rather than Europe's stable but regressive VATs.

The deeper problem is that a robust central state — social democracy's whole premise — can work in small Nordic countries but ossifies at scale. One promising path forward may be Charles Sabel's "democratic experimentalism": a state that sets goals and benchmarks rather than rigid rules, pushes delivery down to local units, and holds them accountable through transparent peer review.

The center-left's challenge isn't winning the argument for public goods and a social safety net—it's learning to deliver one.

For a young labor organizer, Silicon Valley in the early 1980s was Yankee Stadium. I was successfully organizing hospital workers with the Service Employees in San Jose, but I itched to play in the big leagues. I wanted to mobilize the immigrant women assembling chips and hard drives in the booming companies that had replaced our fruit orchards and were poisoning both workers and our groundwater with the toxic solvent trichloroethylene.

So I wrote to one of my heroes, William “Wimpy” Winpisinger, the Democratic Socialist firebrand who ran the International Association of Machinists. I reminded him that the IAM already had 15,000 union members in Silicon Valley’s defense sector, and that many of them had family members working at Intel, Apple, Atari, Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductor, and Tandem. No other union had an opening like this. I argued that if the Machinists organized these companies now, when they were small, union membership would grow along with these businesses. Would the IAM commit resources to organizing Silicon Valley?

Email was still a decade away, but the typed letter I got back assured me that the Machinists were deeply committed to organizing “Silicone Valley.” So I went to work at a local defense plant, became a leader of the Machinists, and joined a few efforts to organize Atari and National Semi. Along the way, I became a political ally of Michael Harrington, the admirable founder of Democratic Socialists of America.

The “Left Wing of the Possible”

Harrington is best known for The Other America (1962), the book on US poverty that prompted the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to declare a War on Poverty. More than anyone of his era, he bridged European democratic socialism and pragmatic American politics. He rejected the idea of a third-party socialist movement in the US as a recipe for isolation, advocating instead for “realignment” — working inside the Democratic Party alongside labor, civil rights groups, and feminists to drag it in a social-democratic direction.

Harrington believed authentic democracy couldn’t exist if a tiny corporate elite controlled the economy. He wanted public and democratic control over major investment decisions so production would serve human needs — healthcare, education, housing — rather than private profit. He envisioned a comprehensive safety net with universal healthcare, guaranteed employment through public works, and aggressive federal action to eradicate poverty. And he viewed a strong, democratized labor movement as the essential vehicle for working-class power.

Harrington died of cancer in 1989. By then, I’d earned a business degree after a decade with unions. Times had changed, and the Democratic Leadership Council — co-founded by Bill Clinton — was declaring New Deal liberalism dead. To win national elections, the DLC argued, Democrats had to abandon “big government” solutions and appeal to suburban, middle-class voters.

The DLC aimed to address social ills through lean government rather than federal spending. They favored free markets over regulations on corporate power, as epitomized by NAFTA and the partial repeal of Glass-Steagall. They went for “workfare not welfare,” as cemented in the 1996 PRWORA, which replaced AFDC with TANF block grants, lifetime limits, and work requirements. As to labor, they preferred to train workers to increase their “human capital” to compete in a globalizing economy rather than strengthen unions to protect them from the effects of globalization.

Clinton looked like a sleeker, less Marxist-inflected version of social democracy, so I signed on. So did much of Europe. By the turn of the century, more than two-thirds of EU citizens lived in countries led by center-left leaders. Gerhard Schröder in Germany and Tony Blair in Britain were essentially Clinton clones, lifting ideas from the right to temper the excesses of capitalism.

Socialist-Free Europe

But in large European countries, the bloom has fallen from social democracy’s trademark rose. By 2016, the share of Europeans living under social-democratic governments had been halved. Those of us expecting a leftward swing of the pendulum since then have been disappointed again and again. Today, only a handful of Europe’s national leaders are social democrats — Spain's Pedro Sánchez, Malta's Robert Abela, Lithuania's Inga Ruginienė, Iceland’s Kristrún Frostadóttir, Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støreand, and, for a few more days, Denmark's Mette Frederiksen. Importantly, all but Sánchez govern small states — altogether roughly 12% of the EU’s population.¹

This group is shrinking before our eyes. On May 8, Frederiksen — fresh off a battle with Trump over Greenland that had buoyed her polling — failed to assemble a coalition after Denmark’s March general election, in which her Social Democrats posted their worst result since 1903. The king then asked the center-right Defense Minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, to lead the negotiations. This week, Poulsen appears to be within striking distance of forming a right-wing government.

Then this past Sunday, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez took a historic beating in the Andalusian regional election. His Socialists collapsed to 28 of 109 seats and 22.7% of the vote — their worst showing ever in Spain’s most populous region, which social democrats have ruled almost continuously for nearly four decades.

The rest of Europe is increasingly devoid of democratic socialists, especially in larger countries.² Germany’s once-mighty SPD sits at roughly 13% in nationwide polling — fourth, behind the xenophobic, Putin-curious AfD, the center-right CDU, and the Greens. France’s Socialists are nowhere. As The Economist recently put it, in much of central Europe, there is barely a socialist party to contest elections, let alone win them.

What happened? Analysts point to five forces.

• Political identities fragmented alongside labor markets. The center-left’s anchor was a highly organized industrial working class that has now been transformed by automation, deindustrialization, and the shift to technology and service economies. In Europe, as in the US, unions could never organize “Silicone Valley.” Gig workers and software engineers did not inherit the same institutional ties to unions and labor parties that their factory-worker parents had. Nor did blue-collar unions have any feel for the highly educated urban professionals who increasingly dominate progressive politics. The left became culturally and economically unmoored from its rural and industrial heartlands.

• A backlash against neoliberal triangulation. The 1990s–2000s project of reconciling social justice with deregulation and globalization initially worked, but over time it blurred the line between the center-left and the center-right. The German SPD’s embrace of Schröder-era Hartz IV welfare reforms, and the broader center-left support for austerity during the Eurozone debt crisis, told core voters that their traditional protectors had quietly switched sides. The US had its own version of this.

• The politics of immigration displaced the politics of class. National sovereignty, European integration, and especially immigration moved to the front of voters’ minds. Center-left parties historically favored cosmopolitan, humanitarian approaches. But socially conservative working-class voters felt exposed to rapid demographic change and economic competition. Right-wing populists framed immigration as a threat to both national culture and the welfare state — and peeled off a substantial bloc.

• Competition from Greens and left populists. The center-left no longer has a monopoly on progressive or anti-establishment votes. Urban, educated, climate-conscious voters defected to Green parties; voters frustrated by inequality and austerity bolted to Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise, and similar movements. The US echo is DSA activist Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York's mayor last November. But this is no longer Michael Harrington’s DSA. It condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but blamed “US imperialist expansionism” for Russia’s aggression, demanded that America withdraw from NATO, and refused to support arms for Ukrainian self-defense. Harrington, who spent much of his life arguing that democratic socialists had to be unsparing about Soviet aggression, would have wept.

• “Pasokification”. In a strange twist of political history, the European center-left became a victim of its own historic triumphs. Throughout the 20th century, social democrats built the pillars of the European model — universal healthcare, robust pensions, strong labor protections, and public education. Center-right parties largely accepted those programs as standard, non-negotiable elements of European governance. Once preservation of the welfare state became the consensus across the political center, it became harder for the center-left to articulate a distinct, visionary project. (This has also happened in the US, where even Donald Trump shows no real interest in repealing Obamacare or Social Security — and his cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will almost certainly prove politically damaging.)

  The phenomenon is widespread enough that political scientists coined a term for it: Pasokification. They named it after Greece’s PASOK, a center-left party that earned 43.9% of the vote in 2009 but only 4.7% in 2015 — from governing to electoral irrelevance in six years.

The Welfare States of America

Most progressives believe the United States offers only a bare-bones safety net compared with Europe. Conventional wisdom holds in the aggregate, but it breaks down state by state. Many blue states behave like social democratic members of the old EU.

When William Beveridge created the British welfare state in the 1940s, his goal was “to slay the five giants: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness”. The activist (and unrepentant eugenicist) designed child allowances, maternity leave, unemployment insurance, disability payments, universal healthcare, and old-age pensions.

The US took a different route. The federal government is wholly responsible only for old-age pensions (Social Security) and elderly health care (Medicare); it contributes generously to child tax credits and to health care and food assistance for the poor through Medicaid and SNAP.

Progressive states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have stepped in to slay the remaining giants. In some cases, they match or exceed European standards:

• Paid family and medical leave. In the last decade, the number of US states with state-mandated paid family leave has quadrupled and now covers roughly a third of the US population. Measured in fully paid weeks for new parents, New Jersey is in the neighborhood of France, Massachusetts of the United Kingdom, and California of Australia.

• Unemployment insurance. The EU pays the jobless for longer, but during the initial months after a layoff, unemployment insurance in many progressive states replaces over half a worker’s previous wages — temporarily leaving newly laid-off Americans in high-benefit states better off than counterparts in Austria, Finland, or the UK.

• Targeted tax credits and subsidies. Blue states have pioneered expansive state-level Earned Income Tax Credits and child tax credits, alongside aggressive childcare and healthcare subsidies via state-augmented Medicaid expansions and state marketplaces. These policies have proven highly effective at reducing child poverty and cushioning the baseline volatility of the American labor market.

But blue states differ fundamentally from EU models in how they pay for all of this.

• They tax corporations and the rich. European social democracies rely on value-added taxes of 20-25% to fund their welfare states. These regressive consumption taxes provide a large, stable, broad revenue base. American blue states are structurally prohibited from imposing a VAT and politically constrained from raising flat consumption taxes to European levels. Instead, they fund expanded social programs through high taxes on top-tier incomes and capital gains. Democrats like this for equity reasons, but it ties state revenue to the stock market, tech IPOs, and the continued residency of a small pool of high-net-worth individuals — a far cry from VAT’s stability.

• They have to balance their budgets. Unlike sovereign European nations (or the US federal government), American states must close their books every year. In downturns, when demand for the safety net peaks, blue states experience sudden revenue shortfalls. With no power to print currency or run structural deficits, they are forced into painful spending cuts or temporary federal bailouts.

• Capital and labor can change states easily. In the EU, language, culture, and law create friction that limits tax-driven migration. In the US, a family or a business that concludes that its blue-state tax burden outweighs the benefits can easily move to Texas or Florida. This places a hard cap on how high progressive states can raise tax rates.

• Uneven service delivery. European welfare states pride themselves on universalism and automation, which minimizes administrative costs and procedures. Even the most generous American state programs are layered atop a fragmented federal bureaucracy. Low public awareness, complex applications, and administrative hurdles mean actual take-up rates for state-paid leave or childcare subsidies are often low, leaving state safety nets patchy in practice.

What is to be done?

At the root of social democracy’s crisis lies a paradox the liberal tradition has never resolved. Liberalism is animated by a deep suspicion of concentrated power — yet it has always needed a strong central state to enforce the rule of law, break up private monopolies, and build the institutions a free society depends on. (Competitive markets themselves are not spontaneous; it took central authority to dissolve feudal privilege, standardize currencies and weights, and enforce contracts uniformly.) The history of liberalism is not a march toward shrinking the state but an unstable, never-finished effort to calibrate it: strong enough to secure liberty, constrained enough not to crush it. Social democracy sits at the far end of that spectrum, staking everything on a robust, competent central administration.

That bet pays off best in small, cohesive societies like the Nordic or Baltic countries. On a larger scale, it struggles to adapt to a fast-changing world. Detailed central rules go obsolete faster than they can be rewritten, and they collide with messy local realities. Administrations respond with waivers and exceptions until the rule of law degrades into a patchwork of carve-outs and incumbent protections.

Columbia political scientist and legal scholar Charles Sabel offers a way through this dilemma that he calls democratic experimentalism. His premise is that modern problems — climate, complex social services, volatile markets — are defined by deep uncertainty: the center cannot anticipate every local variation or future disruption, so top-down bureaucracy is bound to fail. The fix is not to abandon public administration but to rewire it as a continuous experiment, with a feedback loop running between the center and the front lines:

• The central government sets goals, not methods. It defines what counts as adequate education, clean water, or safe food, establishes metrics, and acts as a clearinghouse — pooling performance data and forcing disciplined comparisons across localities.

• Local units get real discretion. Schools, environmental agencies, and municipal offices pursue the national goals in whatever way fits their circumstances and ground-level knowledge. In turn, their cumulative field experience helps reshape central government goals.

• Local autonomy is conditional. Local units must report results transparently; those that fall short enter a peer-review process and adopt corrective measures drawn from their higher-performing peers.

The state stops being a rigid commander and becomes a facilitator of social learning, revising its own standards in light of what actually works on the ground. Building the systems, skills, and leadership to make this work is, of course, a nontrivial undertaking — but it points in an interesting direction.

Michael Harrington was a pragmatist who preached the “left wing of the possible.” That stance produced lasting victories, from Social Security and Medicare to the Affordable Care Act, and a fifty-state laboratory in which blue states have quietly built something closer to European social democracy than most Americans realize.

What it has not produced, on either side of the Atlantic, is a center-left that can win durable majorities — or reliably deliver the services it promises in large countries. Solving that puzzle is the core challenge for today’s progressives — and it calls for solutions that traditional social democrats are still reluctant to entertain.

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1. Most European countries are small. Just five countries—Germany (84 million), France (69 million), Italy (59 million), Spain (49 million), and Poland (36 million)—account for roughly two-thirds of the EU population. Note that the UK, Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland are not in the EU.

2. A scorecard of social democratic parties across Europe, condensed from Wikipedia.

• Austria: The Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) hit its worst post-WWII result in 2024 with just 21.1% of the vote, losing ground to the historic rise of the far-right FPÖ.

• Bulgaria: The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) saw its support collapse from 27.2% in 2017 to a record low of 6.8% in mid-2024.

• Croatia: The Social Democratic Party (SDP) recorded its worst parliamentary results in decades in the 2020s due to fierce internal clashes, which led to the expulsion of several MPs and a party split in 2022.

• Czech Republic: Social Democracy (SOCDEM) suffered a total collapse, dropping from 20.5% of the vote in 2013 to losing all parliamentary representation after falling below the 5% threshold in 2021 and 2024.

• France: The Socialist Party (PS) plummeted to historic lows after President Hollande’s unpopular pro-business policies, culminating in a dismal 1.7% in the 2022 presidential election. While the left rebounded as part of the “New Popular Front” alliance to challenge the far-right in 2024, the PS remains fractured and overshadowed by more radical left-wing forces.

• Finland: The Social Democratic Party (SDP) has suffered decades of decline in municipal and national support, losing power to a right-wing coalition in 2023 despite a brief bump in its vote share. However, the party bucked the broader decline by performing exceptionally well in the 2025 municipal elections, capitalizing on public backlash against government austerity.

• Germany: Long-term damage from grand coalitions with the center-right culminated in a disastrous 2025 federal election, where the SPD cratered to just 16.4% of the vote.

• Greece: Once the country’s dominant force, PASOK collapsed to single digits by 2015 due to public outrage over its enforcement of severe economic austerity measures during the European debt crisis.

• Hungary: Swept by corruption scandals and heavy criticism over its management of the Great Recession, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) lost 133 seats in 2010, which paved the way for the dominant rise of the right-wing Fidesz alliance.

• Iceland: After suffering massive defeats in the 2010s that left them as the smallest party in parliament, the Social Democratic Alliance (SDA) mounted a massive comeback in 2024. The party surged to 20.8% of the vote, successfully forming a new government with its leader as Prime Minister. See footnote 1.

• Ireland: The Labour Party recorded its worst result since 1987 during the 2020 election, dropping to just 4.4% of the vote as working-class voters defected to the left-wing nationalist Sinn Féin.

• Italy: The Democratic Party (PD) hemorrhaged support by the late 2010s due to public backlash over its austerity measures and a failed 2016 constitutional reform. They were relegated to the opposition after a landslide right-wing victory in 2022.

• Lithuania: After suffering consecutive drops in support through 2012, 2016, and 2020, the Social Democratic Party engineered a strong rebound in 2024. Winning 19.32% of the vote, the party successfully formed and led a new coalition government.

• Luxembourg: The Socialist Workers’ Party (LSAP) hit its lowest support levels since the 1930s during the 2013 and 2018 elections, dropping to third place in total seats.

• Netherlands: The Labour Party (PvdA) collapsed from 24.8% of the vote in 2012 to a stagnant 5.7% in 2017 and 2021. To survive, the party formed an alliance with the Greens (GroenLinks)—set to formally merge into “Progressive Netherlands” in 2026—, but the joint ticket slid to a disappointing fourth place in recent elections.

• Norway: The Labour Party (Ap) suffered a multi-decade decline, hitting historic lows in the polls and losing control of traditional strongholds in the 2023 local elections. However, the party pulled off a dramatic comeback in the 2025 national election, rising to 28% of the vote to successfully form another minority government.

• Poland: Following a major corruption scandal in 2003, the Democratic Left Alliance lost its dominance to liberal rivals and eventually lost all of its parliamentary seats in 2015. The center-left finally returned to government in 2023 under the “New Left” banner, acting as a junior coalition partner in Donald Tusk’s cabinet.

• Spain: The Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) hit historic lows in 2015 due to competition from the left-wing Unidas Podemos. However, the party defied the “Pasokification” trend by regaining power in 2018 and steadily increasing its vote share to 31.7% by 2023.

• Sweden: The historically dominant Social Democrats—who once regularly secured near-majorities—steadily bled voters to the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats through the 2010s. By 2018, the party hit a historic low of 28.3%, its worst electoral showing since 1908.