Route to Nowhere

Peter Mair

• The Heart Beats on the Left by Oskar Lafontaine, translated by Ronald Taylor
  Polity, 219 pp, £12.99, September 2000, ISBN 0 7546 2582 6

European social democrats have never had it so good. By the end of the 20th century, they were in government, either alone or in coalition, in 14 of the 19 Western European democracies, ruling over some 88 per cent of Western Europe’s citizenry. Only on the periphery – in Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Norway and Spain – did they remain in opposition. In 11 of these 14 countries, including France, Germany, Italy and the UK, the heads of government came from social democratic parties. The sheer scale of this success was unprecedented: never before had Europe’s four leading democracies been governed at one and the same time by social democrats. Many of these parties had begun to organise for the first time almost a century earlier; as the millennium dawned, they found themselves close to enjoying a real monopoly of government.