Ten years ago, insurgent parties across southern Europe were elected on promises to transform capitalism. Their failure offers lessons the contemporary left cannot afford to ignore.

As new left projects are gaining momentum — from Mamdani’s recent triumph to the emergence of a new left party in Britain — it is worth revisiting Europe’s ‘left moment’ of the 2010s. A decade ago, expectations were high. Although the SYRIZA government had just capitulated to the Troika, hopes still rested on other Southern European left parties (Podemos, the Left Bloc), a rejuvenated Labour Party in the UK, and Mélenchon’s new party in France. Ten years on, however, neoliberalism remains firmly in place, increasingly authoritarian and openly warmongering. Even worse, the far right has since established itself as the main challenger to the political centre, despite its alleged break with neoliberal orthodoxy being largely illusory. How did we get here?

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For much of the post–Cold War period, the European radical left has been marginal. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc undermined not only state socialism as a model, but the very idea of a systemic alternative to capitalism. The 1990s and 2000s were defined by the triumph of neoliberal hegemony and the erosion of class consciousness. During that period, the radical left averaged barely 6.6 percent in national elections.

Yet, social democracy’s neoliberal turn created a political vacuum. From the late 1990s onwards, new left formations emerged — Die Linke in Germany, the Parti de Gauche in France, SYRIZA in Greece, Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, and later Podemos in Spain. These parties positioned themselves as alternatives both to neoliberalised social democracy and to ossified communist parties unable to connect with new activist layers shaped by the anti-globalisation movement.

The Eurozone crisis of the 2010s gave these parties their opening. In Greece, Spain, and Portugal, austerity was first imposed by centre-left governments, resulting in mass waves of popular resistance. While trade unions sometimes played a role, protest largely took the form of mass social movements, civil disobedience, and grassroots solidarity networks. Some of these new parties, especially SYRIZA and Podemos, successfully embedded themselves in these movements and became their political vehicle.

By the middle of the decade, as mass mobilisation ebbed, the electoral opportunity peaked. In 2015 alone, SYRIZA came in government in Greece, Podemos and Bloco achieved historic results, Jeremy Corbyn took over Labour, and Bernie Sanders launched a campaign that revived social democracy in the US. Before Trump and Brexit, it appeared that the radical left had seized the initiative, even keeping the far right out of parliament in Spain and Portugal.

None of these forces, however, fulfilled their promise. SYRIZA’s capitulation to the Troika in July 2015 marked a turning point. After briefly challenging austerity, the government accepted a new bailout, further cuts, and extensive privatisations. These policies paved the way for the right’s return to power and SYRIZA’s transformation into a mainstream social-democratic party. In Portugal, Bloco’s prolonged parliamentary support for a centre-left government yielded little influence over policy, culminating in electoral collapse and the rise of the far-right Chega. Podemos followed a similar path by entering government with the PSOE, losing its anti-establishment profile while allowing its senior partner to claim credit for modest reforms. Today, Podemos languishes at the bottom of the polls, while Vox steadily grows.

Despite the historic opening created by the financial crisis, the radical left failed to alter the neoliberal order. Objective constraints were real: weak trade unions, uneven development within the EU, a fragmented European working class and, indeed, a fragmented European left. Class consciousness has partially recovered since 1989 but remains largely reformist, hesitant to draw systemic conclusions even amid climate catastrophe, war, and spiralling inequality. Decades of neoliberal dominance continue to shape political horizons.

Yet these obstacles were not immutable. The radical left was constrained by its circumstances, but it also made its own, decisive choices. Across different national contexts, these parties shared common programmatic, strategic, and organisational features that explain both their rapid rise and their subsequent, even more rapid decline.

From Radicalism to Reformism

To be radical is to address problems at their root — namely, capitalism itself. By that measure, the radical left of the 2010s was radical in origin. These parties emerged from non-Stalinist communist traditions: Bloco from Trotskyist, Maoist, and Eurocommunist currents; SYRIZA from a coalition centred on the Eurocommunist Synaspismos; Podemos from a mix of left populist intellectuals, Trotskyists, and Indignados activists.

Over time, however, their programmes were steadily moderated. SYRIZA’s early calls for nationalisation gave way, by 2015, to a social-democratic platform limited to opposing austerity and restoring the welfare state, without even questioning Greece’s membership of the Eurozone. This refusal to contemplate a break with the monetary union fatally weakened SYRIZA’s negotiating position and reflected a broader neo-reformist outlook: the attempt to placate neoliberal capitalism through representation rather than confrontation.

Defenders of this approach argued that exiting the Eurozone would have been catastrophic. In doing so, they simply reproduced the logic of TINA (‘there is no alternative’) and assumed a static balance of class forces. Yet, the Oxi referendum momentarily demonstrated the potential for a radical shift, had the government chosen to mobilise its base and pursue measures such as capital controls, bank nationalisation, and state-led industrial policy. That alternative was never seriously considered, because SYRIZA had already abandoned any transitional programme beyond capitalism.

Bloco followed a similar path. Focused primarily on defending the welfare state, it twice propped up a social-democratic government without advancing a credible socialist alternative. By the time it withdrew support in 2022, it was indistinguishable from the status quo and paid the electoral price. Podemos’ moderating trajectory was even faster: openly embracing a neo-Keynesian, social-democratic agenda, it achieved limited reforms in government, but these were politically monetised by the PSOE.

This programmatic moderation was driven by electoralism. In seeking ‘electability’, these parties limited themselves to resurrecting elements of postwar Keynesianism — higher taxes, welfare, public services — combined with progressive cultural politics. But the conditions that once allowed such reforms within capitalism no longer exist. In today’s polycrisis, neo-reformism leads not to reform, but to adaptation to and eventual absorption by the status quo.

From the Streets to the Institutions

The rise of the neo-reformist left depended not only on anti-austerity programmes, but also on their early engagement with mass movements. SYRIZA, Bloco, and Podemos initially acted as movement-parties, translating social resistance into political capital. SYRIZA’s close ties to Greek social movements enabled its dramatic breakthrough in 2012, when it replaced PASOK as the main party of the left. However, this success bred complacency. As social mobilisation declined, the party shifted decisively towards parliamentary politics, neglecting the grassroots forces that had propelled it in the first place.

This institutional turn culminated in SYRIZA’s reliance on elite-level negotiations with the Troika. The Oxi referendum could have marked a return to mass mobilisation and a Europe-wide challenge to austerity. Instead, it remained a tactical manoeuvre within an overall strategy that stayed in the confines of capitalist democracy. The party lost because it chose to play a game whose rules had been set by its adversaries.

Bloco’s parliamentary fixation during its years of support for a minority government similarly eroded its grassroots presence. Podemos institutionalised even faster, explicitly proclaiming a shift from mobilisation to institutions within a year of its founding. During the Catalan crisis of 2017, it limited itself to constitutional reformism as mass protest was unfolding in the streets.

At the European level, institutionalism was even more pronounced. Transnational cooperation was minimal, confined to symbolic gestures and weak coordination in the European Parliament. Even during SYRIZA’s confrontation with the Troika, no serious effort was made to build a pan-European anti-austerity front. The opportunity to revive left internationalism was squandered, leaving today’s European radical left more fragmented than ever in the post-1989 era.

Internal Organisation

Programmatic moderation and strategic institutionalisation were mirrored internally. Parties that began as pluralist and democratic gradually bureaucratised, often to suppress internal dissent in face of programmatic and strategic moderation. SYRIZA’s transformation from a coalition into a unitary party made sense, but it took the form of concentration of power at the top, disempowering the rank-and-file. Entry into government accelerated this process, paving the way for careerists and a steady rightward drift. The eventual, even if short-lived, election of a former Goldman Sachs banker as leader symbolised the party’s degeneration.

Bloco and Podemos followed comparable paths. Bloco’s founding organisations dissolved into a tightly controlled apparatus, while Podemos rapidly centralised decision-making through online mechanisms that atomised its membership. Initial mass participation gave way to demobilisation and personalisation around Iglesias, whose departure left a vacuum that is yet to be filled. Ironically, all these developments were justified, often explicitly, by a rejection of ‘Leninist’ democratic centralism, but what the neo-reformist left ultimately reproduced was its bureaucratic caricature: centralism without democracy. In doing so, it betrayed its original promise of building a different kind of left party.

Lessons for the Left

After decades of neoliberalism and amid a deepening systemic polycrisis, the European left faces its own, prolonged crisis. Trade unions are weak, mass workers’ parties have disappeared, class consciousness lags behind the material realities, and the revolutionary left is fragmented and marginal. In this context, the experience of the Southern European left provides three important lessons one decade later.

First, the left cannot limit itself to managing capitalism. Reforms are necessary, but they must be embedded in a radical programme for economic and political democracy. Without that bridge between immediate demands and systemic transformation, reformism leads nowhere.

Second, real power comes from mass mobilisation. Electoral politics and grassroots activism are not alternative routes to choose from, but complementary strategies — two sides of the same coin. Radical left parties must once again become movement-parties; and remain so rather than trading one for the other at the first glimpse of electoral glory.

Third, unity matters. Fragmentation on the radical left today far exceeds the real political differences. Equally important, any unity project must be pluralist and democratic, combining internal debate with coordinated action. Properly understood and applied (rather than merely paid lip service to), democratic centralism remains indispensable.

Capitalism has long insisted that there is no alternative to itself. Much of the left has internalised this idea, limiting its ambitions to managing or mildly reforming the system. Nevertheless, inequality, authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, and war are pushing more people towards radically questioning this system that, like every system before it, might seem eternal. The left must catch up with this historical current and rediscover the courage to fight for a new society.

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