Right? Left? Center!(Brief Article)

As summer fades, a new era in European politics is emerging, a world of zero tolerance for extremism--or, indeed, of any significant deviation from the center. This fact explains the meteoric rise of France's "Monsieur Tolerance Zero," the crime-busting Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in Jacques Chirac's new government. It explains the applause of most Spaniards as Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar last week ordered police to shut down offices of the freshly outlawed Batasuna, political arm of the Basque terror group ETA. It also explains the success of the stolid, centrist pragmatism of Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and his modernized Social Democratic Party, and the stumbling of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and his history-trapped Social Democrats. The moral: in this world, perish the party that strays from political ground zero.

This has been a year of realignment in European politics. The remarkable point is not a shift from left to right, but rather the triumph of the center. If Persson's Social Democrats look to be coasting to victory in Sweden's Sept. 15 elections, it's because they've cornered the center. If Schroder, a week later, finds himself and the SPD in electoral hot water, it will be because he yielded the moderate middle to Edmund Stoiber's Christian Democrats. (If Schroder wins, so goes the joke across Europe, it will be because of an act of God--the tragic flooding that would benefit any politically savvy incumbent.) In the new political order, dogma and ideology have little sway. Pragmatism rules. "Parties that can adapt are successful," says Robert Taylor of the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. "Parties that are prisoners of their own history are not."

Extremism and eccentricity have no place in the new political order. Slovakia's elections on Sept. 21 have not garnered much media attention, but NATO and the European Union are keenly interested: if the unpalatably extreme former prime minister Vladimir Meciar manages to reclaim his office, Slovakia will be unwelcome in either organization. NATO and the EU will pay similar heed to who wins Macedonia's Sept. 15 elections. In Holland, the electoral success in May of the fringe party of the assassinated Pim Fortuyn looked like a victory for a party not of the center. But since then the faction has all but fallen apart in internecine fighting.

In this electoral season, most eyes are understandably on Germany, Europe's biggest economy. But it is Sweden, with a ...