What links Rishi Sunak to Elly Schlein, the leader of the Italian left, and Raphaël Glucksmann, the great hope of the French Socialist party? America. The British Prime Minister lived in the US for a number of years, first as a student at Stanford University before working for a hedge fund in California. Schlein, born and educated in Switzerland, is the daughter of an American academic who cut her political teeth as a staffer on both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

The 44-year-old Glucksmann, born in the posh part of Paris to a prominent philosopher, has never lived in the States but he’s been a frequent visitor over the years. He touched on this in an interview in 2018: ‘When I go to New York or Berlin, I feel more at home, culturally speaking, than when I go to Picardy, and that’s the problem.’

Across Europe the left are in retreat politically

It’s been a problem, too, for Sunak and Schlein. One can’t fault Sunak’s efforts in trying to fit in but, try as he might, one can’t help feeling he’s far more at ease in California than he is in County Durham.

‘I have lived and worked in California and I actually think it’s one of the reasons that I would be good at this job,’ Sunak told the BBC in 2022 as he campaigned to replace Boris Johnson in No. 10. ‘Because what I will bring to this job is a way of thinking that is different.’ Unfortunately for Sunak it’s become apparent that his way of thinking is different to that of a great many Conservative voters.

Schlein told the New York Times that she settled in Italy, where her mother was born, because it ‘has strong potential that only needs to be freed’. According to Schlein, implementing ‘environmentalist and feminist’ policies will help Italy realise its potential.

When Schlein was elected head of the Italy Democratic party a year ago, I predicted she would pose no threat to Giorgia Meloni, despite the hysteria of the chattering classes who dreamed of her crushing the Italian prime minister. Schlein was doomed to fail for the same reasons the French Socialists have ceased to exist as a credible force: both have lost the working-class vote because they no longer have anything in common with the middle-class university graduates who have captured these parties.

One recent opinion poll found that support for the Democratic party in Italy has dipped below 19 per cent. This is inferior to what they polled in the 2022 general election, and ten per cent shy of Meloni’s approval rating. ‘A real disaster for Elly Schlein,’ according to Il Tempo newspaper.

Sunak has done an unintentionally good job of shedding the Red Wall votes the Conservatives were loaned in the 2019 election. He and his advisors are as deaf to working class concerns as Schlein because they lack empathy.

Which brings us back to Raphaël Glucksmann. Quite why the Socialist party believe he is the man to lead them to success in June’s European elections is anyone’s guess. When he made his New York quip in 2018 (what could be defined as the motto of the ‘Anywheres’ of this world), one prominent French magazine said he had ‘shot himself in the foot’.

Six years on and the wound hasn’t healed. It has recently been reopened by François Ruffin, considered as a possible left-wing candidate in the 2027 presidential election. Ruffin belongs to the moderate wing of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party La France Insoumise (LFI). I heard him speak at a protest rally in January last year and he was impressive: articulate and reasonable, devoid of the angry incoherence that characterises so many of the LFI’s 75 MPs.

Glucksmann, an MEP, has been courting Ruffin in recent months, hoping to draw him into his camp for the European elections. His advances were courteously rejected last month when Ruffin published an open letter to Glucksmann on his website.

Ruffin brought up the 2018 remark, reminding his rival that he is an MP in the Picardy region. It was once a left-wing heartland but eight of the 17 MPs in the Somme Department now represent Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

Ruffin accused Glucksmann of representing a European elite ‘that is moving forward, arrogantly and unconsciously’. He characterised it as ‘daddy-style social democracy’ of the sort that had brought the Yellow Vests and then the farmers onto the streets in desperation. In particular Ruffin charged Glucksmann with belonging to the centre left that had conspired with the centre right to ignore France’s 2005 ‘No’ vote against the European Constitution. ‘This denial, this contempt, breeds deep resentment, which weighs on souls,’ wrote Ruffin.

It was an eloquent assault on what the French call the Bo-Bo [Bourgeois Bohemians] Progressive left, but there was one word missing from the 2,500 written by Ruffin. Not once did he mention ‘immigration’.

He has, however, in the past. In an interview in December 2020 he said: ‘I’m in favour of bringing back the borders on capital, goods and people…we need to set limits on the unrestricted movement of people.’

It was a common-sense declaration but one that unleashed a wave of indignation from within his political party. Ruffin has since been more circumspect on the question of immigration. But until he or someone else on the French left breaks this institutional denial about mass immigration they will remain a force in decline. The latest opinion poll on voter intention at the European elections have both the Socialists and LFI in single figures; Le Pen’s party are around 30 per cent.

Across Europe the left are in retreat politically. The exception is Denmark, where the Social Democrats are in power under Mette Frederiksen, whose tough anti-immigration policy has proved popular with the electorate. ‘For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,’ Frederiksen said in 2019, the year she was elected PM.

Frederiksen has stayed in power because she had the courage and honesty to listen to the anger of the lower classes who, as she stated, suffer most from mass immigration with wages, housing and healthcare all squeezed. Sunak, although not a left-wing politician, will soon be out of power because he didn’t have the courage or honesty. Schlein and Glucksmann will never achieve real power for the same reasons. But they’ll probably always have a job waiting for them across the Pond.