07/07/2011
Álvaro Delgado-Gal: “After 40 years of success, Social-Democrat policies have plunged into a material and moral crisis that is plain to see”
“All through the Social-Democrat cycle social provisions have been denatured: they’ve become an instrument to buy votes, so that votes are exchanged for provisions. This entails the corruption of parties thus acting and citizens thus voting, according to personal interests instead of general interests”
“We are talking about Social-Democrat policies that have been common to all European parties for a long time. Also to Conservative parties as a way to get power and to keep political and social stability”
“The spirit, approach and idealisation of the Welfare State differs in left- and right-wing parties. While for Conservatives it is used to preserve social peace and distribute justice, for the left it has been a concession and a relinquishment of revolution as a way of progressively advancing toward total equality”
“Social-Democrat policies are condemned in their classic profile, given the lower growth rates and the unfavourable pyramid of population. This sets all parties in an uncomfortable position, particularly left-wing ones which will have to explain that the future will be different”
“Although the difference between left and right finds its source in the French Revolution, the moral father of the rupturist left is Rousseau”
“The crisis of Social-Democracy is giving way to several reactions in the left: deadlock situations, the reorientation of the revolutionary drive to the change of habits, and the possible reversion to ideological models prior to Marxism”
“Zapatero has oriented his progressive policies to the change of habits”
“The project to radically transform society through violence has always been in the left. This tendency has been marginalised at times, and at other times it has emerged with virulence and has even managed to seize power”
“The current electoral and institutional crisis of European Social-Democracy could lead the left to ideological approaches which seemed to be overcome after the fossilization of Communism”