In last week's Village Vincent Browne argued that Pat Rabbitte has disappointed expectations of him as leader and has moved the party decisively to the right, brought now new dynamism to the party and failed to provide a "Rabbitte-jump" in its electoral fortunes.
There is no talk now of major expenditure programmes on health and education. No sharp dissent from the consensus on foreign policy, including the facilitation of the war in Iraq by the use of Shannon as a pit-stop (Michael D Higgins certainly dissents but his perspective is not shared by his leader). There are repeated assurances on no new taxes. Signals to reactionary populism that he (Pat Rabbitte) shares anxiety over immigrant workers (the reference in an Irish Times interview in January to work permits for EU nations and the aside on 40 million Poles). And the hard line on crime (a position shared by most in the party).
Well, is there any substance to these claims or is it typical Browne hyperbole? It's fair to say that many if not most party members and supporters are disappointed with the immediate prospects and would blame Rabbitte to some extent. In his defence, there's only so much a leader can do with a stagnant and conservative party organisation often dominated by local notables who don't always want to see the bigger picture. But people like Vincent Browne, who regard themselves as true radicals, are always impatient and critical of the compromises and constraints within which social democratic parties necessarily exist. Nevertheless Rabbitte is certainly guilty of focusing too much on the electoral pact as the road to power and has neglected the important task of giving people a reason to vote Labour in the first place.
What about the accusation of "reactionary populism"? Here Browne is over-doing it as usual. The usual ingredients to be found in the populist cocktail - anti-elitism, genuine and authentic anger against the corrupt establishment, economic egalitarianism, cultural conservatism, nationalism, euroscepticism, anti-capitalist rhetoric - are almost entirely absent from Rabbitte's political modus operandi. On the contrary, part of the problem with the Labour leader is that he's too much of an insider, a politician's politician, admired more by the pundits than the public. His clever wit in the Dáil doesn't travel too far outside its precincts and the public remains largely indifferent. Bertie Ahern, for all his verbal infelicities and occasional downright inarticulacy, appears, like George W. Bush, somehow more real. Perhaps this is why Rabbitte is being outshone by Enda Kenny, now that the latter has found his feet and grows in confidence.
But it's not all down to personalities. There is the little matter of the declining salience of economic differences between most of the parties - something I've commented on ad nauseum. The vaguely termed "quality of life" issues like health and childcare will be much fought over in the next election campaign and Labour has staked out some credible positions on most of them. The problem is with its overall message.
More generally, social democratic parties across Europe could find themselves caught between the post-material values of a younger electorate that tends to be free of partisan attachments and an emerging populism that is more likely to articulate a politics of pre-material values based on culture, nationality and identity, dealing with issues of who correctly belongs to the political community. The raw materials for such a politics already exist in Ireland and there is a potential electoral market for it. However, I would expect Sinn Féin rather than Labour to assume the populist mantle already in evidence throughout the continent.
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