Madrid–Outgoing Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, of Spain, had until recently been the beneficiary of propitious circumstances. Party infighting enabled him to outmaneuver the establishment favorite in the 2000 primaries. Four years later, he eked out an eleventh hour victory in national elections when a terrorist bombing mere days before voting turned the tide against incumbent conservatives. As he took office, a booming economy—which enjoyed the second largest budget surplus in Europe as late as 2007—paved the way for an ambitious social agenda, which rallied his progressive base.

But if a flair for the unexpected studded his ascent, it was a bruising inevitability that brought him low. A rapidly worsening economic crisis left him with little choice but to announce, in April, that he would not stand for re-election. After months of daily flaying by an emboldened conservative opposition, early elections came as a relief for Zapatero, even as his party blamed him when it was trounced, as expected, two weeks ago.

But Zapatero didn’t fall alone: Center-left governments in Portugal and Greece have also fallen in recent months. All in all, it’s a long-standing trend. Leftist governments in Europe have been teetering now for over a decade. Ten years ago, social democratic governments were at the helm in half the countries of the EU. That number has since dropped to three. But their recent plight is their most dire. The sovereign debt crisis has done more than batter incumbent socialists out of office; it may well have stripped the social democratic movement of its soul in the crisis zone.

Even before the latest crisis hit, it was widely presaged that social democracy was on the wane in Europe. The continent’s working class, fragmented under the pressures of globalization, had already been moving toward alternative parties for a number of years. But the current financial crisis has amplified those trends. The mood is uniformly grim among the continent’s center-left set.

That’s especially the case in the European periphery, where the debt problems are greatest. For left-leaning politicians in countries hurtling toward the precipice of insolvency, there is frightfully little room to alleviate mounting unemployment and anemic growth. “The crisis has shown what was probably true for some time, that these governments have limited scope to determine their own economic policy,” Says Jonathan White, of the London School of Economics.