“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.”
G.K. Chesterton
A new party group may soon be formed in the European Parliament that combines Chesterton’s two forms of ruinous politics in a single party: the Conservative Progressives. Its main constituent is Sahra Wagenknecht’s party – straddling the left and right, and busy trying to prevent mistakes from being corrected. One of Wagenknecht’s main policy ideas is the resurrection of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and the strengthening of old industries.
There are three parties so far – not enough yet to form a group: there is Wagenknecht’s BSW, Robert Fico’s Smer and the Czech Stacilo! (Enough!). They want to get the group up and running within a year, and hope to define their political space against the progressive left, focussing instead on traditional values such as worker rights, peace and economic stability. The three together have 13 MEPs. To become a group, they need at least 25 MEPs from seven different member states. They are confident that this can be achieved. And given that the wheel between progressives and conservatives is always turning, they may just have to wait their moment. So we could end up with a traditional left group other than the S&D, while fragmentation continues.
Politics always has its progressive or conservative forces. This is a new variant. They two run circles around each other, each of them having their go before being taken over by the other. In the past, those currents would run inside big parties. But with the emergence of new parties this tendency has expressed itself more outwardly.
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the creation of new parties in Europe and fragmentation of parliaments. Progressive new left wing parties rose on the back of the financial crisis, motivated to strive for more fairness in societies with increasingly complex identities, and to act against climate change. Amongst the progressive forces, there was also the centrist revolution of Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He came to power with the promise of bringing an end to the old left-right divide. But instead of uniting, he is now likely to leave behind a more polarised political landscape with a stronger far-left and far-right. Elsewhere in Europe, far-right parties claimed back political space and even rose to power in Italy and the Netherlands with their family values and chez-nous identity against migration, coupled with a touch of nostalgia.
