Social Democracy in Crisis Europe: Growing Scepticism or Enthusiasm on the Centre-left?

The social-democratic party family has become one of the most pro-European forces of the political mainstream in the past decades. As integration has become more politicised and contested, in particular in the Euro crisis, this orientation has been called into question. Potential electoral losses as well as pessimist analyses of the EU’s social promises clash with calls for ‘more Europe’ as the solution to the current impasse. This paper asks how this changing environment affects the integration preferences of social-democratic parties. In particular, it examines the expectations of increasingly critical evaluative statements as well as more demands for reform and further integration. I will draw on manifesto data for a large number of cases as well as an in-depth content analysis of party-internal and parliamentary debates in Germany and France. The varying data sources allow to discern ideologically and strategically driven adjustments to the ‘default Europeanism’ of the centre-left.