Introduction

Abstract

Mainstream parties of the left have been in a state of slow and uneven decline in Europe for the past forty years. If the reasons for this are well understood, then less well understood is how the parties have been reacting to their difficulties. With the EU itself seemingly occupying a high profile in campaigns for the 2019 EP elections, and with campaigns progressively polarised around the new cleavage dividing anti-system, anti-Euro ‘sovereigntist’ forces from traditional, pro-European, pro-Euro parties, the elections offered the mainstream left an opportunity to attempt a comeback by offering a radical agenda of European democratisation, or ‘critical Europeanism’. Such an agenda provides an answer to the question of what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century and has been given increasing urgency by the coronavirus outbreak. However, parties of the left face at least four obstacles in the way of the effective pursuit of such an agenda. These are, growing Euroscepticism in their own ranks; the national and protectionist outlooks of former supporters they need to win back; the limited capacities of the European institutions themselves to communicate in effective ways; the difficulties the parties face in cooperating and pooling sovereignty within the framework of the PES and the other transnational organisations of the left. Consequently, besides exploring the extent to which the mainstream left is pursuing an agenda of ‘critical Europeanism’ at all, we also wish to know how successfully the left is dealing with the obstacles in its way.