Democractic Socialism for beginners - Part one: Eurosocialism By Marc Brazeau Sept. 2026

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM FOR BEGINNERS — Part 1: EUROSOCIALISM

With the rise of Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, and various DSA contenders, I'm seeing a lot of misunderstanding of what DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM is. I'm not a socialist, I'm a social democrat, but I understand the history and traditions and because I'm not trying to defend the political identity or convert anyone, I hope I can just make things a bit clearer.

In this installment, I just want to establish that democratic socialism isn't necessarily about 'public ownership of the means of production' nor does socialists getting what they want inevitably lead to locales all turning into Cuba, Venezuela, or gulag states.

Here I'm just going to outline some simple history that Americans are almost universally unaware of and even Europeans have memory-holed a bit.

POSTWAR EUROPE WAS LARGELY BUILT BY SOCIALISTS.

Coming out of WWII democratic socialism was a dominant political alignment in most of Europe and socialist parties, whether named Socialist, Social Democratic, or Labour, shaped the state of those economies and the welfare states that built prosperous middle classes across Europe.

It should be noted that for a century, 'democratic socialism' and 'social democracy' were synonyms, with 'social democracy' simply emphasizing reform over revolution and a greater distance from the Soviet model or influence. While I believe the two terms started to diverge in the 90s, and now represent different, though related, political-economic tendencies, for many they are still synonyms and that is not wrong, though many, like me, have a different view. Likewise, this was all uneven and took different forms. While the German PSD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) was the most powerful socialist party in Europe a century ago, socialism in Germany was crowded out by Bismarkian conservative welfarism and the Swedish social democrats became the most successful socialist party in Europe.

Being committed to democracy and participating in multi-party democracies meant that they had no path to 'owning the means of production' other than through a few strategic state-owned enterprises (Renault in France for instance) or nationalizing natural resources (coal mining in the UK). But they did develop other approaches that were not just quantitatively different ("more generous") than in countries without governing socialist parties, but were qualitatively different, most famously in universalist welfare states and welfare systems that defended individuals from the labor market instead of the systems in the United States designed to push you back to work as soon as possible and keep citizens under the discipline of the market. Likewise, their consensual, stakeholder democracies were thicker than mere majority rule elections and created a very different relationship between labor, capital, and the state.

So, they produced systems that were qualitatively different than mere 'progressive' governance. What follows is a chunk of something I wrote for an different, longer project but serves the purpose of detailing that, YES, IN FACT, these were socialists running various European governments and designing those socieities. This matters because people like Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani explicitly get much of their inspiration and ideology from eurosocialism.

I would assert that the Nordics and the Netherlands are not capitalist countries with generous welfare states but social democratic market economies. Further, in places like France, Italy, and Spain or Germany under Willy Brandt, there were distinctly socialist ways of managing capitalism that are different than simply 'saving capitalism from itself'. German co-determination of major firms is a fully social democratic reform, not mere progressive unionism.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM IN EUROPE

To repeat, what gets confusing for people is that 'social democracy' and 'democratic socialism' were synonyms in referring to the political tradition and the names of the parties. As they were successful in winning elections and putting their ideas into law and practice, the countries where they were most successful came to be called 'social democracies' and as social scientists classified various styles of system, in academia, the Nordics and the Netherlands and Belgium came to be understood as true social democracies because of their universalist programs, while other European democracies like France and Germany got referred to as social democracies colloquially as embodying the social democratic tendency.

As the social democratic countries matured and took on some deregulatory and market reforms in the 80s and 90s, the meaning for what sort of system the country had hardened into social democracy as it's own thing distinct from democratic socialism. But it remained the case that social democratic parties in Europe were populated by people who thought of themselves as democratic socialists.

The Labour Party in Britain was a socialist party during the post WWII period when their basic system was shaped. Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Aneurin Bevan were all socialists and played major roles in shaping postwar Britain. John Maynard Keynes was a major influence on British policy and postwar economic institutions. He was not a Labour guy, but in his own words, his own kind of liberal socialist.

The Swedish Social Democratic Party drove the creation of the Nordic Model in Sweden and was headed by Hjalmar Branting, Per Albin Hansson, Tage Erlander, and Olof Palme as Prime Ministers during key points of construction. The Swedish Social Democratic Party was a socialist party during those decades and all of those guys were socialists. Stefan Löfven, PM from 2014 to 2021 is a socialist and is currently serving as President of European Socialists since 2022.

The Labour Party (Arbeidarpartiet) in Norway was a socialist party all through the postwar era when they built the Nordic Model in that country. The Labour Prime Ministers Einar Gerhardsen (considered 'the Father' of the nation and the chief architect of their system), Oscar Torp, Trygve Bratteli, Odvar Nordli, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Thorbjørn Jagland were all socialists.

In Finland, Social Democratic Party of Finland was a socialist party during the relevant period. Mauno Pekkala was elected to PM in 1946 when socialist candidates take the PM office across Europe. Karl-August Fagerholm was PM and was best known for passing and approving the national pension law. The main architecting of Finland adopting the Nordic Model occurs in the 1960s and 70s as the country went from predominantly agrarian to urban. Rafael Paasio comes in 1966–1968 and 1972 . He was followed in his party by Kalevi Sorsa, Mauno Koivisto, and Paavo Lipponen during that building period. Only Paavo Lipponen considered himself as having left behind socialism.

In Denmark, the Social Democrats are a socialist party. Thorvald Stauning (1924-1926 | 1929-1942) was a key figure in standing up the Social Democrats in Denmark and laying the groundwork for their version of the Nordic Model. He said of himself that he was first and foremost a democrat, then a socialist. An important peer to Hjalmar Branting in Sweden.

He was followed by Vilhelm Buhl, Hans Hedtoft, H.C. Hansen, Viggo Kampmann, Jens Otto Krag, Anker Jørgensen, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt (2011-2015), all self-identified socialists.

In The Netherlands, Willem Schermerhorn helped form a new socialist party, the Partij van de Arbeid (“Party of Labour”) in 1946 as PM with Willem Drees who became PM from 1948 to 1958. They were followed in their party by the PMs Joop den Uyl and Wim Kok, both self-identified socialists.

In France, the tradition starts with Leon Blum who was PM from the French Section of the Workers' International. Paul Ramadier was the first PM of the Fourth French Republic (Jan–Nov 1947) from the same party. He was followed by René Pleven of the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance. Then Guy Mollet of the French Section of the Workers' International. In the 80s and 90s we saw the PMs Pierre Mauroy, Laurent Fabius, Michel Rocard, Édith Cresson, Pierre Bérégovoy, and Lionel Jospin. In this century, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Manuel Valls, and Bernard Cazeneuve were all Socialist Party PMs up through 2017. François Mitterrand founded the Socialist Party in 1971 and served as President of France at just shy of 14 years was the longest in any French Republic.

In Germany, I'll admit that the modern welfare state was implemented by Bismarck to keep the socialists out of power and bind workers to employers rather than free them from employers as the Nordics do. The two consequential socialists were Willy Brandt (1969-1974) and Helmut Schmidt (1974-1982). Their signature contribution was extension and democratization within the existing corporatist frame, not a Nordic-style universalist refounding. The Mitbestimmungsgesetz — the major codetermination law giving workers near-parity representation on large companies' supervisory boards — passed in 1976, under Schmidt. That's matters, but Germany doesn't fit on my list the way the rest do.

Finally, in Spain the socialists can't get started until Franco has left office and they've had a chance to rebuild. Since 1982, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) has been the dominant governing party rebuilding Spain since Franco left in 1975. Felipe González Márquez led the party from 1974 through 1997. He was Prime Minister from 1982 to 1996, the longest serving PM in republican Spanish history. He made massive changes. Felipe González built Spain's universal welfare state — NHS, education to 16, pensions, unemployment protection — and modern infrastructure almost from scratch in one long tenure, compressing into a decade the Nordic-style transition other countries took generations to complete. He was followed by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011) and the current PM Pedro Sánchez starting in 2018. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party has been governing Spain in a multi-party democracy for 29 of the last 51 years since Franco left, and govern today.

That's not to say that what the goals are haven't changed. Nor that for many, though not all people, social democracy stopped being synonymous with democratic socialism.

Sanna Marin of the Social Democratic Party of Finland and PM from 2019-2023 is not a socialist. She's a social democrat who sees that as something different. On the other hand, a very recent PM from Sweden, Stefan Löfven, is the current President of the European Party of Socialists.

Mette Frederiksen, Denmark's current PM, doesn't fit neatly on either side of this history. She has been openly critical of her party's Third Way, neoliberal-adjacent turn, and her economic instincts — a wealth tax aimed at Denmark's top 1%, an explicit "the price of globalization is paid by the lower classes" framing — sit closer to the older socialist toolkit than to the market-accommodating social democracy that followed Godesberg. Whether she'd call herself a socialist, I doubt it. But that gap between substance and label doesn't undermine the history here — if anything it's the point. I draw the same distinction she implicitly does: I'm a social democrat, not a socialist, and I think the two have become genuinely different things. That's a split I think is healthy. But a split that exists today doesn't rewrite what the words meant for the last hundred years and what they still mean to many.