WHEN they started planning the Malmo European Socialist conference a few months ago, few can have dreamt it would be like this. When the leaders convened yesterday, in their midst were a new British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, swept into office by a landslide that exceeded all expectations, and a new French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, winner of an election that was not even a twinkle then in President Chirac's eye.
The Brussels press hacks, a mighty cynical bunch, talk of a "red tide" sweeping Europe, and then laugh.
Have Europe's voters just taken to kicking out whoever happens to be in power, or is there more to it than that? "Pinkish" might be a more appropriate description than red, but, although Europe's new masters are hardly Bolsheviks, the return to power of the left, and of President Clinton, on whom it has remodelled itself, has to be seen as more than a series of unconnected electoral blips.
Today only two EU governments are run by the right - Spain and Germany - and both of those of a distinctly unThatcherite hue.
There are three governments where the left works unencumbered by the constraints of coalition or cohabitation - Britain, Greece and Portugal. In the majority of the rest, social democrats, in one guise or another, play a predominant role.
The European Social Democratic parties (PES) Congress in Malmo is being attended by nine EU prime ministers.
Next year it is on the cards that they could take the biggest prize, the throne of Helmut Kohl, whose handling of the Bundesbank fiasco may have crippled him.
Yet it was not long ago that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan told us the Cold War was over and "won by us".
Their targets included the social democrats of western Europe as well as the communists of central and eastern Europe. History was over, we were told glibly, ideological debate replaced by broad consensus, socialism dead with the idea of society and social responsibility.
The struggle for political power was then reduced to the competition between managerial elites, to a contest over - as in Marx's idealised withered away state - the mere administration of things.
Ideologically, it was the epoch of There Is No Alternative (TINA). The new politically correct economics meant the acceptance of the reality of the globalisation of financial markets and therefore of financial orthodoxy at home. The price of profligacy would be paid in percentage points on interest rates and at the whim of the world markets. Privatisation in. Subsidies out ...
Yes, the left too has taken on this agenda. Tony Blair will go to the Amsterdam summit with a call for increasingly flexible labour markets as his main catchery - once a taboo of the left because of its association with increasing job insecurity.
He is even threatening to block agreement on an employment chapter in the treaty if it involves serious Brussels spending, and although willing to sign up to the social chapter, he has made it clear he wants as little as possible legislative use made of it.
But is this Thatcherism Plus, or something new? For some, the appeal of New Labour in Britain is undoubtedly that they believe Labour now has the moral authority and the caring credentials to carry the lady's revolution forward with greater sensitivity.
And the Herald Tribune recalled this week that despite much press comment over the "old Labour" attitudes of Lionel Jospin's party, it was the same party which had modernised many features of the French economy in the early 1980s. "Coming from the left," the paper argued, "the shift was generally accepted as necessary, even by many unions.
Although Jospin has perhaps yet to travel as far as Blair, and the French tradition of state intervention is more strongly embedded than the British, few doubt that he is on the same course of modernisation.
But Thatcherism with a conscience is not Thatcherism, as she would be the first to insist. And yet, what is it?
Struggling to accommodate themselves to the realities of globalisation and the undoubted popularity among parts of the electorate of the Thatcher model, Europe's socialists have come up with a new formula for electoral success. It is, however, still incomplete in its articulation of the nature of the society the parties wish to create, in the "vision thing".
They have accepted the economic realities and made a telling critique of the harshness of the conservative medicine, but what do they stand for?
My suspicion is that unless they find a new way of articulating their new community values agenda in a manner that is comprehensible, electoral success will be hard to sustain.
