u/Flagmaker123

As you all probably know, we have seen democratic socialists win elections for various executive offices, most famously Zohran Mamdani in New York City, and there has been intense discussion on the prospect of a democratic socialist running for president in 2028.

However, I would like to say that jumping straight to winning executive offices is not a very good strategy. People in chief executive positions, such as presidents or mayors, can only do so much on their own, they would need their legislature, such as a city council or Congress, to back many if not most of their proposals if they want them to get enacted.

We have already seen this become a problem for Mamdani. He is certainly a well-intentioned person and is likely a genuine socialist, but he doesn't have many socialist allies in other positions of power (DSA only has 4 out of the 51 seats in City Council!). As a result, we have already seen him pre-emptively compromise on many of his positions to try to get at least some of his agenda passed. For example, his preliminary FY 2027 budget back in February gave less funding to parks and libraries than promised while increasing funding to the police department. While it does seem now that his recently-proposed executive budget does slightly decrease police funding now (from $12.6 billion to $12.4 billion), it still slightly cuts funding to libraries (from $658 million to $655 million; when only including operating expenses, it's from $531 million to $526 million, which is about 0.42% of the budget, below the 0.5% he pledged) and parks (stays at around $1.38 billion; when only including operating expenses, it drops from $725 million to $685 million, or about 0.55% of the budget, way below the 1.0% he pledged). In addition, he endorsed establishment Democrat Kathy Hochul for governor and endorsed Brad Lander over the DSA candidate, Alexa Avilés, in New York's 10th congressional district, leading to the latter dropping out.

While I am under no illusions that the owning class would just tolerate socialism (i.e. workers' ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange) being enacted even if it did peacefully win elections in both legislative and executive offices, we have clearly nonetheless seen that Mamdani has needed to compromise on even many of his basic social-democratic reforms.

None of this is a moral condemnation of Mamdani, don't get me wrong, he probably is trying to do what he can in a hostile political environment. I am simply illustrating this to show how winning executive offices without having much power elsewhere is a bad idea. A similar situation is true for the presidential election. While a democratic socialist winning the presidency would be nice, they would be unable to do much of what they want if Congress was still controlled by capitalists (which it likely would be in 2028; there are literally only two DSA members in Congress right now), though the President does have many powers on their own.

This isn't to say running for executive offices is totally useless. They do come with some powers of their own, but I think there needs to be greater focus towards winning legislatures if we want greater reforms to be done. Currently, the DSA does not have a majority in any city council; we will need to change that if we want any mayor we elect to be able to fulfill any of their promises.

[P.S. I would also like to add as a final note: don't focus exclusively on electoral politics either. Electoral politics is one part of the puzzle here. Your activism should not just be voting in an election every few years and moving on.]

As an American, I've generally seen the rise of the far-right as being due to mass discontent with the neoliberal status quo leading to people getting disillusioned and attracted to groups offering an alternative, thus being attracted to anti-establishment populists. However, almost consistently, it's far-right populists that have garnered more success and popularity than their left-wing populist counterparts.

In the United States, this makes perfect sense. There's a two-party system where one of the parties has gotten taken over almost entirely by far-right populism, while left-wing populism remains a small fraction of the other party. Not to mention how the US has demonized anything even vaguely left-of-center for over a century because of the Red Scare. It makes sense why the prior would be much more successful.

But why is this also the case in Europe? In Europe, there are left-wing populist parties that have existed for decades! Die Linke in Germany, the Greens in the UK, Socialist Left and the Red Party in Norway, the Left Party in Sweden, etc. However, despite the existence of these parties, it still appears that they haven't been able to garner as much support from people disillusioned from the neoliberal status quo compared to the far-right.

In Germany, the AfD is the 2nd-largest party in the Bundestag while Die Linke remains the smallest. In the UK, Reform UK consistently tops polls while the Greens usually are below or around Labour. In Norway, the far-right Progress Party has become the 2nd-largest party with 47 seats while Socialist Left and the Reds have just 18 seats combined (out of 169 total). In Sweden, the Sweden Democrats have garnered over 70 seats and are now supporting the current right-wing coalition government, while the Left Party is over three times smaller.

Why is this? What is stopping the European left from garnering support in this time of mass discontent in the same way the far-right has?

[P.S. I should mention there are of course exceptions. Ireland has no rising far-right populist party while Sinn Fein is doing quite well on both sides of the island. In the 2024 French legislative election, the left-wing NFP bloc won more seats than both the centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally. However, this is still a general trend I have noticed.]