Iberian Socialist Parties: After the Crisis, a Return to Ideology as a Guide for European Integration?

This paper approaches the ideological change of the Portuguese and Spanish socialist parties regarding European integration, after the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt and bank insolvency crisis in some Euro countries (one of them Portugal). One of the stated conclusions is a return to ideology in the programmatic proposals of the two parties, mainly aiming the policies that are considered the nuclear paradigm of the social democratic ideology over EU - Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and Social Policy. This research is based on a qualitative analysis of primary sources, such as programmatic basic principles of the parties, the electoral manifestos, congress resolutions, and some public and parliamentary declarations, through which it’s concluded that there has been a programmatic evolution from the Maastricht Treaty era until the end of 2017. Besides a qualitative analysis used as the basic empirical source for this study, it’s also taken into consideration some existing quantitative studies. To complement the understanding of such conclusions, national historical and electoral contexts are approached as a crucial factor that shaped social democratic parties’ visions for European integration, as well as the recent European economic and electoral dynamics, where Iberian economies are placed with special features and interests. Evidence is found that the parties, which in the Maastricht bargaining didn’t contradict the monetarist tendency of EMU, are now proposing the transfer and creation of fiscal, social and other regulatory competencies for and in EU supranational level as the way to bring economic rational coherence to EMU and competition justice to the European market. Through this analysis, one can state that Portuguese and Spanish socialist parties have returned to ideology as a policy guide for European integration, given the fact that these parties had strong ideological visions for it when they were in opposition to dictatorships and during democratic transitions in both countries. But, as soon as the parties assumed governmental responsibilities, even coming from two weak economies where strong side effects of the common market liberalization and convergence criteria of EMU were predicted to be felt, they supported the monetarist perspective for monetary policy and didn’t make alternative proposals for the institutional architecture of Euro, once that immediate national economic strategies were priority. So, national interest was, at the time, the main driver for European integration. And isn’t it now? As the recently claimed competences for EU, which give it a kind of a Keynesian role, seem to be seen a compensation of national economic and budgetary incapacities of these two countries to fulfill financial and national social duties within the scope of EMU, one can also state that national interest keeps being the driver for European integration. Or, one can say that national interest meets ideology after the 2008 crisis.