That is why it is keen to encourage privatisation, the dismantling of the public sector, and concentrations and mergers of giant corporations. It is willing to renounce the social compact and has abandoned all idea of full employment or eradicating poverty, of seeking to alleviate the plight of the EU's 18 million unemployed and 50 million poor. Social democracy won the intellectual battle after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The conservatives lost and are preparing to quit the field of history, as the aristocracy was forced to do after 1789. The left now has to reinvent its place in the political spectrum, while the mantle of conformism, or conservatism, has fallen on the social democrats.
Social democracy is the new right.
It has taken on the historic task of taming neo-liberalism in a spirit of vacuous opportunism. It is at war with Serbia today and may be fighting its own suburbs tomorrow. All in the name of realism, not rocking the boat, above all not disturbing the status quo.