OK. The framing has shifted, though.

These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".

(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham

But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")

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wood_spirit 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(What stuff is happening to the center left in Sweden right now?)

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nyargh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.

The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.

This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]

There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]

The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.

Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.

1. https://arbetet.se/2026/09/21/sjukforsakringen-forklarar-var...

2. https://www.thelocal.se/20261012/beer-strike-and-contract-br...

	▲	cbolton 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
	▲	wood_spirit 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now). I would say the center party is center-right.

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JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> centrism

I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.

And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.

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oliculipolicula 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)

	▲	JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform Why? Status quo is the default in any state.