As Europe’s political landscape shifts, two-Party system fades

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, emphasizes the failure of the European center-left to keep its promise “to create growth and redistribute it to make a fairer society.”With the decline of the manufacturing sector and weaker unions, the left has been forced to buy into the orthodoxy of market economics, which “means their core support has been hollowed out here,” he said, as in France, Germany and Sweden.

“The center-left seems intellectually dead,” Mr. Grant said, little different from the center-right. “So you see alternatives on the far left like Die Linke, Podemos and Syriza,” he said, referring to the Left by its German name.

Meanwhile on the right, he said, politicians and elites are increasingly unpopular, blamed for the 2008 economic crash, the euro crisis, stagnant growth, austerity and the bailing out of bankers.