Introduction

Daniel Keith and Luke March

It's no exaggeration to say that Alexis Tsipras, the head of the left-wing SYRIZA party in Greece, is the most feared man right now in all of Europe.

Beyond the obvious ludicrousness of this statement (most of Europe had hardly heard of Alexis Tsipras when this was written in mid-2012, let alone trembled before him), such a view throws up several questions. How could the young leader of a formerly marginal party in a peripheral European country demand such feverish attention? Why was paranoia the dominant reaction from a business correspondent? Last, and most pertinently, why was a leftwing party being seen as a threat to Europe, rather than the more common 'usual suspects', the anti-immigrant Right or terrorism?

One obvious riposte (and one to which we will return) is that mainstream European economic orthodoxy is now so rigid that even moderate social democratic challenges to the status quo are regularly seen as at worst dangerous, at best obsolete and 'politically far fetched'. But the longer-term reality is that parties of the radical Left (i.e. those to the left of social democracy that aim to transform capitalism), which were usually pronounced obsolete and moribund immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are now more relevant actors in Europe than at any time since. At the same time, left-wing ideas have appeared to move from marginality to the mainstream, particularly in the wake of the post-2008 Great Recession. In the early years of the crisis, there was renewed interest in Marxian and Keynesian classics. Later, Thomas Piketty's critique of capitalist inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, became an unlikely bestseller. To take just the UK example, public figures such as Owen Jones and Russell Brand have brought left-wing anti-establishment sentiment to the mainstream, while in Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour Party now has a leader who would scarcely be out of place in a radical left party. Admittedly, the question of radical left 'relevance' and 'mainstreaming' needs significant qualification, but it is one of the primary purposes of this volume to provide such an analysis.

The success of parties such as Syriza and the Spanish Podemos have latterly garnered the radical Left greater media attention as part of the wave of so-called 'left populism'. Nevertheless, even prior to the rise of these 'new' parties, the study of radical left parties (hereafter RLPs) as important phenomena has been gaining momentum. Whereas a decade or so ago, there were barely any in-depth, up-to-date comparative studies, making RLPs the poor relation of party politics fields, this is now decreasingly the case. There are now important studies with five main aims: first, overcoming the empirical deficit by a profusion of single-party and comparative case-study approaches; second, providing conceptual clarity about the radical Left as party family. Third has been analysing RLPs' views on Europe and transcending the simplistic 'Eurosceptic' label often applied to the radical left in the comparative literature. Fourth has been a focus on RLPs and government participation. The final focus has been on understanding RLPs' divergent electoral performance and social support. This reflects that although stabilisation and even an improvement in the electoral performance of RLPs became evident even before the crisis, their electoral trajectories are very variable: for every Syriza there is a 'Pythonised' party, whose fate is recrimination and marginalisation.

Yet despite major advances in our understanding, these newer studies are hardly the last word, not least for the simple reason that the field is dynamic and changes with every election. There are still relatively few researchers involved in systematic study of the radical Left, and vital work could be done simply by updating, broadening and deepening the existing empirical base and in analysing and critiquing the categorisations and hypotheses already advanced. Moreover, there are several areas of RLP activity that have been so far less studied, where further research is most urgent. Perhaps the weakest areas of the existing literature are (1) RLP party organisations; (2) RLPs in the extra-parliamentary realm; (3) the radical Left and populism; (4) RLPs and gender politics.

This is where the current volume fits in. Its overall aim is to further the comparative study of the radical Left in general by expanding the number of cases studied and scholars studying them and thereby to refine and test the contributions of the existing literature. The book developed from a conference at the University of Edinburgh in May 2013. It is dedicated to studying the...