Seven year itch? The European Left Party before and after Lisbon: Struggling to transform the EU

It’s an apposite moment to look at the European Left Party (EL), the newest Europarty. EL held its third congress in Paris in 2010, amid the recognition that it faces significant future challenges in order to react to the adoption of the Lisbon treaty and to ‘build a Europe of social change’. In this paper we examine the organisational development and cohesiveness of the EL by focussing on the interaction between national parties, the party at European level and the GUE/NGL EP group to which all EL MEPs belong with the aim of examining the ‘deepening’ of EL’s organizational cohesion versus the ‘widening’ of its political representation. The 2010 congress showed that the EL is trying to combine these two aims: a) with a new leader and new vice-presidential institutions that attempt to combine geographical, party and issue representation and b) with an increasing number of new members (particularly in Eastern Europe). Whether the EL is becoming more or less organisationally and strategically effective and cohesive as a result is a key question of our analysis.