the election, Schulz's charges sounded surreal. Clearly, he has no clue what happened to his party's support, just as French Socialists had no idea why their backing collapsed in the run-up to this year's presidential election, and just as the Dutch Labour Party struggled to comprehend its electoral implosion in March.

The center-left (i.e. "socialist" parties in Europe) had been getting killed since 2009, but 2017 was a particularly bad year.

It appears that 2018 will be more of the same.



Ask anyone in Italy about who might be sitting at the head of government in Palazzo Chigi following national elections on 4 March and the answer is a collective shrug of the shoulder.

...There is only one likelihood that most pundits do agree upon: that the Italian centre-left, led by formerhe did this while he had to fight his own party every step of the way.



Corbyn won with 59.5 percent of the vote. Burnham, the runner-up, received 19 percent. According to the Guardian, “shell-shocked members of the shadow cabinet, some on the verge of tears, gathered together in small groups in the foyer” in reaction to the victory, while others “continued plotting, in the manner of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of the second world war.”

The neoliberal Blairites failed at preventing Corbyn from becoming the leader of the Labour Party, but that doesn't mean they just gave up.



Instead, within mere hours of Corbyn’s victory, Yvette Cooper — one of his former leadership rivals — and six other shadow cabinet members declared they wouldn’t serve