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"Social democracy nowadays basically amounts to the defence of the status quo and preventing the worst", says Olaf Cramme, director of Policy Network, a think-tank for progressive centre-left politics.
Germany's opposition Social Democrats (SPD) have just recorded their second worst election result since World War Two. They now face an ugly trilemma between entering a grand coalition under Merkel on unequal terms, staying out and seeing her possibly team up with the Greens, the SPD's natural partner, or being punished by voters at a rerun election.
Socialists or social democrats still head 13 of the 28 EU governments and are in coalition in five others, but they are often driven to pursue unpopular policies that hit the interests of their own electorate. "It is an extremely difficult balance", Social Democratic Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt told Reuters in an interview. "We had some reforms that have been seen as quite harsh, but they have also been necessary."
In Britain, the opposition Labour party is still distrusted because it presided over a deregulated financial market bonanza that ended in the crash of 2008, wrecking the reputation for economic competence once built by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
In France, one of the few countries with an absolute centre-left parliamentary majority, Socialist President François Hollande is deeply unpopular as his government dithers between old-style tax-and-spend policies and half-hearted welfare and labour market reforms, satisfying no one.
Compounding the left's problems, some conservative leaders such as Merkel and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt have successfully occupied the middle ground. "(Merkel) has taken any political polarisation away by reverse-engineering the social democratic Third Way strategy", said Henning Meyer, editor of the Social Europe Journal. "Similar to what Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder did in the 1990s and 2000s, she has adopted the most popular policies of her opponents - at least rhetorically."
Austria's Socialists lost votes last month, though they remain the largest party. Italy's centre-left Democratic Party, which now heads a shaky left-right coalition, bled votes to the anti-establishment 5-Star protest movement in a February election and is riven by factional squabbling.
In Greece, Ireland and Spain, centre-left parties are paying a high electoral price for having supported public pay and pension cuts required by international creditors.
In some northern European countries such as Denmark, social democratic parties have pinned their fate on embracing an open, globalised economy and making social protection more selective. "We are trying to do four things at the same time", Thorning-Schmidt said in an interview in her Copenhagen office, drawing four points on a piece of paper. "Fiscal constraint - call it austerity - (and) on the other side growth measures. Then social welfare for the most in need and the restructuring of our welfare model."
The Dutch Labour party is the latest to risk electoral wrath by embracing a long-term shift from a generous welfare state to a "participatory society" in which people provide for themselves more, as outlined in the king's speech to parliament last month.