Syriza did get elected and re-elected(and they didn't abandon their principles, they were forced to put them aside by Merkel's arrogant stubbornness in forcing the Greek people to pay the debts incurred solely by the elites and the banks).
In Germany, the combined support for the Greens and Die Linke(BOTH of which are well to the left of the SPD)matches and sometimes exceeds the SPD's vote share.
In France, the Left Front candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, a former Socialist Party member(the sort who still supports socialism) is currently getting twice as much support in the polls as Manual Valls, the Blairite who's going to be the SP candidate. In the Irish Republic, Sinn Fein(yes, THAT Sinn Fein), which is committed to an anti-austerity program, is getting more than twice the support the Blairite Irish Labour Party is pulling in(Labour there is still stuck around 7% of the vote). In Spain, "Podemos", the anti-austerity party, is running even with or ahead of the PSOE(the old Spanish Socialists who haven't been remotely "socialist" since Felipe Gonzalez pointlessly yoked them to NATO and embraced "market values"
. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party(running on a program that is anti-austerity AND anti-nuclear)all but wiped out Third Way Labour in Scottish constituencies at the 2015 UK general election.
There are many other parties to the left of the "center-left"
and no, these parties can't be classified as "far left" in the sense that YOU would like to imply-none of them are Stalinist or apologists for North Korea or the Khmer Rouge) that have made consistent gains in most of Europe over the years.
If a party is NOT anti-austerity, if it is NOT for helping to strengthen the labor movement, if it is not for something close to peace, in what way can that party even be "center-left"? It hardly means anything that such a party might be pro-LGBTQ or antiracist, because that party can't be popular enough to get into power or stay in power long enough to preserve even those gains.
Who do you think a "center-left" party should fight FOR. steven(I use lower case for your name there because that's how YOU use it in the post)? Is it really worth even HAVING a "center-left" party if that party's program is reduced to nothing more than not being as nasty about building a more unequal society? Or about pretending that war CAN somehow still have progressive objectives?
Do you want the "center left" to be different from the right in any meaningful way? In any way that significantly helps people's lives? How can it be "center left" to say "history is over...nothing can ever really be much different than the way things are right now, and it's enough that it's US cutting your benefits and making your jobs less secure"? What can possibly be "center left" about being a pillar of the status quo?
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