Responding to Europe's Political Polarization

By Jean Pisani-Ferry. In Europe, 2015 began with the far-left Syriza party’s election victory in Greece. It ended with another three elections that attested to increasing political polarization. In Portugal, the Socialist Party formed an alliance with its former archenemy, the Communists. In Poland, the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party won enough support to govern on its own. And in Spain, the emergence of Podemos, another new left-wing party, has ended the traditional hegemony of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party on the center left and the Partido Popular on the center right. (In France, moreover, the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, showed its strength in the first round of December’s regional elections, though it eventually failed to win any). More...