Recent political turbulence in the Eurozone has usually been filtered through an economic prism. With the fate of the single currency planted firmly at the centre of analysis, each development in the member-states has been scrutinized for its potential to undermine ‘confidence’ and ‘stability’. Resignations and electoral defeats, the collapse of old political forces and the emergence of new ones, thus blend into one sequence of exotic diversions from the task at hand. Any sense of what these events actually mean for national and European politics is lost.

For the most part, it has been a question of temporary hiccups: the passing of the neo-liberal baton from centre-left to centre-right in Spain—or in the opposite direction across the Pyrenees—offered little reason for concern among stewards of the Brussels Consensus. If need be, a cabinet of ‘technocrats’ can be assigned the job of managing peripheral Eurozone states on the Troika’s behalf until a plausible government is cobbled together. Voters may swing as freely as they like, but the main lines of economic policy will not be disrupted. Yet elections in two eu countries during the summer of 2012 threatened to disrupt this understanding of political realities. For the first time since the 1980s, parties of the radical left appeared to be on the brink of exercising power from a position of strength, evading the tutelage of centrist parties and pushing beyond the limits of la pensée unique. After a series of ballots which had seen faces change while the programme remained identical, a more fundamental shift in the balance of forces might now be in prospect.

Greece was hit by the first tremor, with syriza vaulting past the country’s centre-left party and running the conservatives of New Democracy a close second in the battle to head a new government in June 2012. Barely had the news from Athens been digested when Dutch opinion polls suggested that another earthquake was in prospect. The Socialist Party (sp)—routinely described as ‘far left’ in press coverage, its leader Emile Roemer bracketed with Alexis Tsipras of syriza as a populist demagogue likely to compromise efforts to stabilize the Eurozone—had eased comfortably ahead of the Dutch Labour Party (pvda); some polls even placed the Socialists above the centre-right Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (vvd) of Dutch premier Mark Rutte. No party of the Second International had found itself out-paced by a competitor to its left in a major West European state since the voluntary abdication of the pci in the early 90s. Now it appeared that two would suffer that indignity in the space of a few months.

Europe’s conservative elites might well have considered this the cruellest cut of all. Long before the prospect of a syriza-led government in Athens had crystallized, Greece was firmly established as a problem country, its politicians and citizenry derided for their presumed unwillingness to match the frugal industry of the Eurozone’s northern tier. The Netherlands, on the other hand, could still boast a triple-a credit rating, and its conservative prime minister was seen as a crucial ally for Angela Merkel in her bid to impose ordonomics on reluctant member-states. Having strained every rhetorical sinew to see off a threat from the periphery, Merkel, Barroso and company had not expected to face a similar challenge from within the Union’s core.

In itself, the presence of radical parties challenging the Blairized centre-left could not be viewed as a striking new development in European politics—although one would be hard-pressed to find any recognition of that challenge from journalists mesmerized by the far right. A document published by the German spd’s research foundation on the eve of the present crisis described the radical left as ‘a stabilized, consolidated and permanent actor on the eu political scene’ which was ‘now approaching a post-Cold War high in several countries’.footnote¹ This family of parties—its diversity fully acknowledged by the author—was ‘increasingly confident’ and ‘as strong, if not stronger than the Greens and the extreme right’. Yet this growth had definite limits: ‘There is little prospect that the far left’s popularity will outflank social democrats in the near future, since social-democratic parties are still far larger, have greater governing experience, political and organizational capital—including still existing relationships with trade unions—and flexibility, but we might expect some continued recalibration of the balance between the centre and far left in favour of the latter.’footnote² After the startling breakthrough by syriza, September’s Dutch election threatened to carry such ‘recalibration’ further than even the most optimistic radicals had thought possible as the year began.

Almost as soon as that danger had registered beyond the Netherlands, however, it seemed to evaporate: in the weeks leading up to polling day, panic gave way to jubilation in the Anglophone press, as ‘pro-European’ forces clawed back ground lost to the Socialists and secured a decisive victory on September 12th—Rutte’s vvd came first with 26.6 per cent, Samsom’s pvda second with 25 per cent. The Financial Times, which just weeks before had predicted a result that might ‘shift the balance of power’ across the entire region, greeted the final outcome with evident relief: ‘The skies are clearing over Europe’—‘the victory of centrist parties supportive of Eurozone rescue measures is the first tangible sign that anti-European sentiment may not be as deeply rooted in northern Europe as many had feared.’footnote³

The speed and scale of the turnaround was dramatic. If we take the ipsos polls as a benchmark—unlike some other surveys, they consistently placed the vvd at the head of the field—the Socialists enjoyed a comfortable lead over the Dutch Labour Party from late April to the end of August. As late as August 24th, the pvda trailed by almost six percentage points behind its rival. Two weeks later, the parties had swapped places, and Labour continued to surge in the remainder of the campaign, ultimately gaining one quarter of the vote against 10 per cent for the sp—though still outpaced, as noted above, by the vvd. On a night when its main competitors tended to gain or lose support on a grand scale, Emile Roemer’s party won almost exactly the same share of the vote as it had secured two years earlier. One scrap of consolation lay in the fact that Roemer would now head the joint-largest opposition party against a vvd–pvda coalition likely to emerge from the vote. But this owed more to a collapse in support for the once-hegemonic Christian Democrats (cda) and the far-right Freedom Party (pvv) of Geert Wilders than to any progress made by the Socialists themselves.