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What can Corbyn’s Labour learn from the collapse of social democracy elsewhere?
If Labour is to govern to transformative effect, it must become the mechanism that mobilises millions of working people, says NICK WRIGHT

IT’S not looking good for European social democracy. With its emblematic parties suffering unprecedented electoral defeats, the essential foundations of its post-war grip on government are fast disappearing.

The electoral statistics are revealing. In the 2017 election the German Social Democratic party attracted just one in five voters, suffering a 5.2 per cent fall in votes. 

Over a five-year period the French Socialist Party suffered a 32.4 per cent drop in its votes, shedding 286 seats. 

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