we have esentially bw the social democrats

True. But it seems less so in Spain?

By chance, I managed to buy the print edition of El Pais today, and found this pearl of an op-ed:
Enrique Gil Calvo: Self-government? (2006 May 1)

The continuation of an unbalanced economic policy, dependent on the increasing value of real-estate, besides being ostensibly rightist is more than doutful, as it has sunk productivity, has bloated inflation and has lost the reins of the trade deficit. So that, lacking the promised labour reform to unblock youth employment, and in the absence of a housing policy protecting the right to form a family, to accomplish a left agenda one has only the Dependency Law.
...
What is progressive is not the distribution of power (and income) among the autonomous territories, but the redistribution of income (and power) among the social classes. But unfortunately, the Spanish left (like the whole of the Western European Left) has lost its own political agenda for the past 25 years. And, not having an agenda of its own, the Spanish left has chosen to adopt as its own the political agenda of the nationalists (with whom it is in a coalition since the Transition [to democracy] against Francoism and today against the PP), which makes of territorial self-government its only goal.

Sigh...

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman