“THEY have disappeared. I don’t even know if they have premises here any more.” In his office overlooking the sun-scorched wharves and cranes of Piraeus, Giorgos Gogos, the head of the dockers’ union, is pondering Pasok, the social-democratic party that for decades dominated the politics of this sprawling Greek port. For years its vote here hovered steadily around 45%. Then came the economic crisis. At the insistence of European institutions the Pasok government agreed to privatise the container terminal at Piraeus. Appalled workers abandoned the party en masse for the far-left and -right, slashing the social-democratic vote to 4% in 2015. Traces of this radicalisation are sprayed across the warehouse walls: hammers and sickles; swastikas; “Piraeus Port Authority in workers’ hands!”. “Why would anyone vote for Pasok now?” asks Kiriakos, a former party activist. “They don’t stand for anything.”

Greece’s economic and political turmoil is unparalleled. But when Mr Gogos jokes that Greece is “Europe on fast-forward” he may have a point. Political scientists looking at Europe’s centre left talk of a continent-wide “Pasokification”. Support for social-democratic parties is collapsing in an unprecedented way.

Early in this century you could drive from Inverness in Scotland to Vilnius in Lithuania without crossing a country governed by the right; the same would have been true if you had done the trip by ferry through Scandinavia. Social democrats ran the European Commission and vied for primacy in the European Parliament. But recently their share of the vote in domestic (and Europe-wide) elections has fallen by a third to lows not seen for 70 years (see chart 1). In the five European Union (EU) states that held national elections last year, social democrats lost power in Denmark, fell to their worst-ever results in Finland, Poland and Spain and came to within a hair’s-breadth of such a nadir in Britain.

Elsewhere, it is true, the centre left is in power: as an unloved and ideologically vague junior party of government in Germany and the Netherlands and at the helm of wobbly coalitions in Sweden, Portugal and Austria, all countries where it was once a natural party of government. In France, President François Hollande is plumbing new depths of unpopularity and may not make the run-off in next year’s presidential election. Matteo Renzi, Italy’s dynamic prime minister, is in better shape but his party is still losing support (and possibly, in May, Rome’s mayoralty) to the Five Star Movement (M5S), an anti-establishment party founded by a blogger. Former municipal and regional bastions like London and Amsterdam, Catalonia and Scotland have slipped from the traditional centre left’s grasp.

Where are all the votes going? Many have been hoovered up by populists, typically of the anti-market left in southern Europe and the anti-migrant right in the north. But alternative left parties (feminists, pirates and greens, for example), liberals and the centre-right have also benefited. And so has the Stay On The Sofa party.

Europe’s left has seen losing streaks before; its fortunes fell sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It bounced back under leaders like Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, who sacrificed their parties’ old affection for rigid labour markets and high taxes in favour of a centrist, “Third Way” combination of social reform, deregulation and good public services funded by the ensuing economic growth. In 1996 Europe’s social democrats were doing as well as ever (see maps).

But voters’ trust in such parties took a blow in the economic crisis of the late 2000s, to which parties of the centre left responded with cuts all but indistinguishable from those made by the right. At the same time parties of the right (especially in Germany, Britain and Scandinavia) nabbed popular bits of the Third Way—welfare-to-work programmes in Sweden, school reform and the minimum wage in Britain—for themselves.

The howling storm

The euro crisis exacerbated matters. In Europe’s north the idea of relaxing austerity came to be seen by many voters as a way of using their money to bail out the spendthrift south. The left’s options were thus sharply constrained. Take the predicament Mr Hollande found himself in. Elected in 2012 on the slogan “time for change”, he promised to curb austerity and reboot the economy. But a 75% tax rate on the rich was dropped after bringing in paltry receipts. The rest of the euro zone insisted that deficit limits which had previously been ignored now had to be taken seriously. With markets breathing down his neck, unable to devalue and spooked by the prospect of France being lumped in with the EU’s struggling south, Mr Hollande cut business taxes and made savings in the budget.

But these circumstantial factors do not fully account for the depth and continental scale of the slump. Four things have made Europe a harsher environment for the centre left: its own success, structural change in the economy, a reduced fear of political extremes and the decline of monolithic class groups.

First, success. Many of the goals of the incrementalist left-wing parties that can be traced back to 1889’s Second International, Marxists who favoured the parliamentary process over insurrection, have been met. A credo of universal public services and redistribution that used to be contentious is now so widely accepted as to be easily captured by rival parties of right and left. As Joseph Muscat, the Labour prime minister of Malta, puts it: “Is anyone contesting that people should have a pension?” The sense of a forward struggle, of victories to win rather than losses to be stanched, is gone.

At the same time European economies have changed in ways that make the collectivist policies on which the centre left was built less effective. The transport of goods has become faster, cheaper and containerised; capital more mobile; trade deals (and associated state-aid rules) more far-reaching; and automation more sophisticated. Jobs have gone overseas or just gone altogether; the unionised industries of the Industrial Revolution, mining and steel, are hugely diminished. There has been a fundamental shift away from manufacturing and towards services, and from state ownership towards the private sector.

Fearful symmetry

The fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the subsequent integration of eastern Europe into the EU hastened some of that change by providing new pools of cheap labour. It also had a deeper effect. The politics of the EU countries had until then been constrained by history: hemmed in by the threat of the Soviet Union on one side and by memories of fascism on the other, social democrats and Christian democrats huddled in the centre ground. A generation later parties can set out their pitch far away from the old mainstream.

This broadening of the political spectrum goes along with the fourth change: a fragmentation of the identities on which the centre left was built. A study published by the BBC in 2013 showed that little more than a third of British voters belong to the traditional working- and middle-classes; the rest are in new, hybrid categories such as “new affluent workers”, “technical middle class” and “emergent service workers”. Young voters raised on social media create esoteric identities of their own rather than commit themselves to collective ones like class. They prefer movements to parties.

This change poses problems to political parties of all hues. But the situation is particularly vexed on Europe’s left, less thoroughly held together by common culture than its right tends to be. The centre left relied on convincing the industrial working class and a significant fraction of the middle class, particularly that in the public-sector bits of the mixed economy, that they wanted the same thing, a trick which was easiest in places where the people involved genuinely started off feeling they had something in common. It is no coincidence that Europe’s most reliably social-democratic regions—Emilia Romagna, Andalusia, England’s north-east and North-Rhine Westphalia—all have populations with a proletarian self-image that helps politicians appeal to working and middle class alike.

Today a divergence of interests, the decline of heavy industry and the success of places where jobs that demand high skills cluster are widening the split between blue-collar voters in fading industrial towns and progressive white-collar ones in booming cities. Citing a Danish political drama about cosmopolitan media-political types, Simon Hix of the London School of Economics points to “the growing divide...between voters in creative, liberal, ‘Borgen’ cities like London, Copenhagen and Berlin with those in rusting factory and port towns like Rotterdam, Malmö and Lille.”

Where once the Copenhagens and Lilles were united in their support for social-democratic policies, now they are divided by the increasingly salient politics of identity. The Borgen types are internationalist and socially libertarian, their counterparts nationalist and socially conservative; the divide runs deepest on immigration and the EU. And new or revived parties on each side of this divide are eager to sweep up the voters that the strained centre left can no longer hold.

Consider the Netherlands, where support for the centre-left PVDA has collapsed from 25% in the 2012 elections to below 10% today. As René Cuperus, an influential thinker on the Dutch centre left, points out, the party has been losing supporters in the big cities and university towns to D66 (a liberal party of entrepreneurs and professionals) and the environmentalists and libertarians of the Green Party; between them the greens and D66 now get the vote of some four out of five Dutch students. Meanwhile the PVDA’s former blue-collar strongholds in places like Rotterdam have veered towards the Party for Freedom run by an anti-immigrant populist, Geert Wilders, who is seeking to do in the Netherlands what Marine Le Pen of the National Front has done in France.

There are parts of Europe where the two diverging groups remain bound together—but it takes a stronger glue than today’s centre left can offer. The adhesive that works is a drive for self-determination, as seen in the cross-class appeal of the Scottish National Party and the Junts pel Sí (“Together for yes”) coalition in Catalonia.

The invisible worm

Left in the middle, the social democrats look defensive and indistinct, concerned more with protecting past advances than forging new ones. They are “neither opponent nor engine”, as Mr Cuperus puts it. “It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project,” Tony Judt, a British historian, lamented in “Ill Fares the Land”, a paean to social democracy he dictated on his death bed.

The things voters found appealing about social democracy are still on offer: consider Angela Merkel’s pension-age-lowering, minimum-wage-introducing, environmentalist brand of centrism. They may also be seen when parties of the harder left come close to, or into, power and find themselves driven to the right by reality. Syriza, elected in Greece as a genuinely left-wing alternative, has found itself enacting policies it once decried: talking to The Economist Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza’s first finance minister, calls his former party “a new Pasok”. Spain’s left-wing Podemos moderated its policies in recent coalition talks with the centre-left PSOE.

Some social-democratic policies, and spirit, can be found in new parties like M5S in Italy and Ciudadanos, a youthful liberal party, in Spain, though there are many other things in the mix, too. Other new outfits may also lay claim to traditionally social-democratic territory: in Berlin on February 9th, for example, Mr Varoufakis launched DIEM 25, a leftish “movement” committed to pan-continental democracy and burden-sharing. And the dirigiste economics that Third Way leaders renounced, but many of their comrades stayed fond of, remain on offer from anti-immigrant populists, too: witness the success of Austria’s FPÖ, which pitches itself to disaffected centre-left voters as the new “social homeland party” with plans for a “building offensive” on housing. It is on track to surpass the governing Social Democrats at the presidential election on April 24th.

Crimson joy?

What strongholds remain are often tired. Take Ludwigshafen, a south-west German industrial city where tens of thousands of workers—having completed their apprenticeships, of course—commute to well paid blue-collar jobs every day. Ludwigshafen voted for the SPD even when Helmut Kohl, one of its own sons, was Germany’s centre-right chancellor in the 1980s. On March 13th, as voters south of the city (in high-tech, environmentalist Baden-Württemberg) and north-east of it (formerly communist Saxony Anhalt) abandoned the party, the stolid voters of Ludwigshafen remained loyal.

Yet at a pre-election rally for Malu Dreyer, a brassy, witty local leader who stands out against her lacklustre peers, the mood was remarkably flat. Ms Dreyer hailed once-social-democratic goodies that all now favour: child care, low unemployment, vocational training (“We want Meisters [foremen] as well as Masters”). A marching band played a foxtrot and “Mack the Knife” for supporters whose average age must have been 60. On the walls were posters with unobjectionable slogans: “Responsibility”, “Staying Together”. “Just Right For Our Time”, read one—but the time was the time of the grandparent.

On their current trajectory, social democrats may well end up like liberals and greens today: subordinate players confined to regional strongholds whose best chance of influence is to nudge other parties in their direction should they get into coalition. But there are still some who are both in power and relatively popular. Their successes offer three lessons.

First, renewal ends with national government; it does not begin there. Mayoralties and regional governments hone precisely the mix of pragmatism and innovative policy thinking that social democrats need if they are to win nationally. In Manchester a dynamic leadership with a “what works” credo keeps Labour dominant in an increasingly globalised city; in Hamburg the SPD parties like it’s 1969 thanks to a resilient coalition of low- and middle-earners.

Second, remember that a leader whom people like and even trust—including people beyond the confines of the party—can be a great asset. The continent’s most charismatic and credible social democrats are among its most popular: Emmanuel Macron, minister for the economy in France, and Mr Muscat in Malta are two examples; another two, looking back, are Mr Blair and Mr Schröder.

And Europe’s social democrats should learn from their North American counterparts, who have so far avoided their gloomy decline by building multifaceted, pluralistic coalitions like that which twice elected Barack Obama, a coalition that ranged from ethnic-minority voters, via urban liberals, insecure service employees and middle-class parents, to industrial workers. To that end Mr Renzi (a former mayor, uncoincidentally) has joined Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new prime minister, to take part in an initiative based at Global Progress in Washington, DC, which aims to reinvigorate the centre left worldwide.

Persuading a plurality of voters that their interests are best pursued by a centre-left government means adopting policies that deliver results. Mr Macron has argued for portable and individual benefits that suit a more fluid, Uber-ised labour market. Others champion retraining programmes such as those at which the Nordic countries excel, or new ways of caring for children and the elderly. Such ideas offer more hope than trying to outdo populists of right and left, or returning—as Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, would wish—to the policies of the 1970s.

Perhaps the best available template is Malta. There the Labour Party spent 15 years in opposition, consistently winning working-class port seats but failing to take middle-class votes. Taking the helm of the despairing party in 2008, Mr Muscat ditched the party’s Euroscepticism and dirigisme for a focus on social mobility, education and getting more women into work. The party won a landslide victory in 2013 and continues to lead in polls today. “What differentiates us and should differentiate us”, he said in a recent interview with The Economist, “is not that we represent those in society who are better off, but anyone who wants to be better off.” Malta, it is true, is a tiny country with a competitive economy. It nonetheless offers something like a way forward for a continent with few such exemplars.

If they want to keep fighting, Europe’s social democrats must reckon with a newly unsentimental, biddable and fragmented electorate and a range of rivals eager to steal their supporters. They will need to combine distinctiveness, credibility and persuasiveness: no mean feat. They are no longer carried forth by the tide of history and are often swimming against it. They must make their own currents.

For transcripts of the interviews mentioned in this briefing please visit www.economist.com/ESDmuscatwww.economist.com/ESDvaroufakis