Keir Starmer and the ‘Pasokification’ of Labour

As the Greek debt crisis took hold in the wake of the financial crash, there was one big political casualty. The main centre-left party PASOK — which had dominated Greek politics since the early eighties — collapsed, going from a comfortable 43.9 per cent of the vote to 13.2 per cent in 2012. A decade on, the party has failed to recover – and the grim news for Keir Starmer’s Labour party is that it faces its own version of Pasokification, one where the fall is slow rather than spectacular, and in which the left could find itself trapped.

It might be hard to imagine British politics without the Labour party, but then again take a look at what has unfolded across Europe in recent years: the story of PASOK’s implosion has replicated itself across the continent. Centre-left parties, who in the past two decades had moved away from their roots and transformed into champions of globalisation and neoliberal economics — the so-called ‘Third Way’ — fell apart.