the strange case of the socialdemocrats' victory

Here, you can find an interesting thesis: socialdemocrats are disappearing because they've won creating a welfare state and a social market system.
I think I agree, although we've to recognize almost three trends.
1) many socialdemocrats are now moving to right wing positions, like Schroeder or Bersani, in order to keep the power. This happens after a significant process of modernisation of their parties.
2) there is a (stupid) return of old-fashion left position to face the previous trend: Lafontaine and Royale are the signs of what I say. They refuse social market, whereas they are still based on the national welfare state*.
3) the new Left is driven by movement in favour of sustainability at the adequate scale. Sustainability does not mean just "environment", it means socio-economic sustainable development, plus sustainability in a temporal perspective.

If I should have to propose a 'manifesto' for a new left wing, I'd like to include also the fact that the EU is necessary as a scale for social state because, as this crisis has shown, we're so linked each other that we can't imagine to continue in this way, nation vs. nation. Usa, China, Brasil, Russia and India are our competitors, could we compete without an adequate size? Not only in terms of market, but politically. We should devolve to the EU policies like school, university and research, environment, VAT, defense, and job market.


We need to re-design a European left, recognizing that we've won in our countries (almost, where left wing gouverned). However, we could be reasonably optimistic if we recognize a general victory and that now we've to restart from zero.


*it's fuzzy the case of Spain, which is not aligned in cultural and political terms to the rest of the EU because it's the youngest democracy. However, Zapatero seems left wing only in terms of civil policy, while economically seems very similar to Aznar.