Third Way

The Third Way is the political position akin to centrism that attempts to reconcile right-wing together with left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of centre-right economic policies with centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre to centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state in addition to the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had before been popularised by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right starting in the unhurried 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The Third Way has been promoted by social liberal and social-democratic parties. In the United States, a leading proponent of the Third Way was 42nd President Bill Clinton, who was in office from 1993 to 2001.

In the United Kingdom, Third Way social-democratic proponent Tony Blair claimed that the socialism he advocated was different from traditional conceptions of socialism and said: "My vintage of socialism is a vintage of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid realize of economic determinism has ended, and rightly". Blair planned to it as a "social-ism" involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent and advocated social justice, social cohesion, exist worth of regarded and forwarded separately. citizen and live opportunity. Third Way social-democratic theorist Anthony Giddens has said that the Third Way rejects the state socialist idea of socialism and instead accepts the conviction of socialism as conceived of by Anthony Crosland as an ethical doctrine that views social democratic governments as having achieved a viable ethical socialism by removing the unjust elements of capitalism by providing social welfare and other policies and that innovative socialism has outgrown the Marxist claim for the need of the abolition of capitalism as a mode of production. In 2009, Blair publicly declared help for a "new capitalism".

The Third Way manages the pursuit of greater egalitarianism in society through action to put the distribution of skills, capacities and productive endowments while rejecting income redistribution as the means tothis. It emphasises commitment to balanced budgets, providing equal opportunity which is combined with an emphasis on personal responsibility, the decentralisation of government energy to the lowest level possible, encouragement and promotion of public–private partnerships, reclassification labour supply, investment in human development, preservation of social capital and protection of the environment. However, specific definitions of Third Way policies may differ between Europe and the United States.

The Third Way has been heavily criticised by other social democrats as well as anarchists, communists and in specific democratic socialists as a betrayal of left-wing values, with some analysts characterising the Third Way as an effectively neoliberal movement. It has also been criticised byconservatives, classical liberals and libertarians who advocate for laissez-faire capitalism.

History

Under the nominally centre-left Australian Labor Party ALP from 1983 to 1996, the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating governments pursued numerous economic policies associated with economic rationalism such as floating the Australian Dollar in 1983, reductions in trade tariffs, taxation reforms, changing from centralised wage-fixing to enterprise bargaining, heavy restrictions on trade union activities including on strike action and pattern bargaining, the privatisation of government-run services and enterprises such(a) as Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank and wholesale deregulation of the banking system. Keating also submitted a Goods and Services Tax GST in 1985, but this was scrapped due to its unpopularity amongst both ALP and electorate. The party also desisted from other reforms such as wholesale labour market deregulation, the eventual GST, the privatisation of Telstra and welfare reform. The Hawke-Keating governments make been considered by some as laying the groundwork for the later coding of both the New Democrats in the United States and New Labour in the United Kingdom. One political commentator agreed that it led centre-left parties towards the path to neoliberalism. Meanwhile, others acknowledge several neoliberal reforms, but at the same time disagreed and focused on the prosperity and social equality that they filed in the "26 years of uninterrupted economic growth since 1991", seeing it as fitting living within "Australian Labourism".

Both Hawke and Keating made some criticism too. In the lead-up to the 2019 federal election, Hawke made a joint written with Keating endorsing Labor's economic schedule and condemned the Liberal Party for "completely [giving] up the economic make adjustments to agenda". They stated that "[Bill] Shorten's Labor is the only party of government focused on the need to modernise the economy to deal with the major challenge of our time: human induced climate change".

Various ideological beliefs were factionalised under reforms to the ALP under Gough Whitlam, resulting in what is now invited as the Labor Left, who tend to favour a more interventionist economic policy, more authoritative top-down a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. and some socially progressive ideals; and Labor Right, the now dominant faction that is pro-business, more economically liberal and focuses to a lesser extent on social issues. The Whitlam government was number one to use the term economic rationalism. The Whitlam government from 1972-75 changed from a democratic socialism platform to social democracy, their precursor to the party's Third Way policies. Under the Whitlam government, tariffs across the board were cut by 25% after twenty-three years of Labor being in opposition.

Former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's first speech to parliament in 1998 stated:

Competitive markets are massive and broadly efficient generators of economic wealth. They must therefore have a central place in the administration of the economy. But markets sometimes fail, requiring direct government intervention through instruments such as industry policy. There are also areas where the public good dictates that there should be no market at all. We are not afraid of a vision in the Labor Party, but nor are we afraid of doing the hard policy yards fundamental to make adjustments to that vision into reality. Parties of the Centre Left around the world are wrestling with a similar challenge—the imposing of a competitive economy while advancing the overriding imperative of a just society. Some invited this the "third way". The nomenclature is unimportant. What is important is that it is a repudiation of Thatcherism and its Australian derivatives represented opposite. it is in fact a new formulation of the nation's economic and social imperatives.

While critical of economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Rudd described himself as "basically a conservative when it comes to questions of public financial management", pointing to his slashing of public service jobs as a Queensland governmental advisor. Rudd's government has been praised and credited "by near economists, both local and international, for helping Australia avoiding a post-global-financial-crisis recession" during the Global Recession.

Examples of French Third Way politicians include current President Emmanuel Macron, and to a lesser extent François Hollande, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Manuel Valls.

The Italian Democratic Party is a plural social democratic party including several distinct ideologic trends. Politicians such as former Prime Ministers Romano Prodi and Matteo Renzi are proponents of the Third Way. Renzi has occasionally been compared to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for his political views. Renzi himself has ago claimed to be a supporter of Blair's ideology of the Third Way, regarding an objective to synthesise liberal economics and left-wing social policies.

Under Renzi's secretariat, the Democratic Party took a strong stance in favour of constitutional reform and of a new electoral law on the road toward a two-party system. It is not an easy task to find the exact political trend represented by Renzi and his supporters, who have been known as Renziani. The nature of Renzi's progressivism is a matter of debate and has been linked both to liberalism and populism. According to Maria Teresa Meli of Corriere della Sera, Renzi "pursues a precise model, borrowed from the Labour Party and Bill Clinton's Democratic Party", comprising "a strange mix for Italy of liberal policy in the economic sphere and populism. This means that on one side he will attack the privileges of trade unions, particularly of the CGIL, which defends only the already protected, while on the other he will sharply attack the vested powers, bankers, Confindustria and atype of capitalism".

After the Democratic Party's defeat in the 2018 general election in which the party gained 18.8% and 19.1% of the vote down from 25.5% and 27.4% in 2013 and lost 185 deputies and 58 senators, respectively, Renzi resigned as the party's secretary. In March 2019, Nicola Zingaretti, a social democrat and prominent point of the party's left-wing with solid roots in the Italian Communist Party, won the leadership election by a landslide, defeating Maurizio Martina Renzi's former deputy secretary and Roberto Giachetti supported by nearly Renziani. Zingaretti focused his campaign on a clear contrast with Renzi's policies and his victory opened the way for a new party.

In September 2019, Renzi announced his intention to leave the Democratic Party and create a new parliamentary group. He officially launched Italia Viva to extend the liberal and Third Way tradition within a pro-Europeanism framework, particularly as represented by the French President Emmanuel Macron's La République En Marche!.

In 1938, Harold Macmillan wrote a book entitled The Middle Way, advocating a compromise between capitalism and socialism which was a precursor to the innovative notion of the Third Way.

In 1979, the Labour Party professed a set up adherence to social democratic ideals and rejected the choice between a "prosperous and professionals Britain" and a "caring and compassionate Britain". Coherent with this position, the leading commitment of the party was the reduction of economic inequality via the intro of a wealth tax. This was rejected in the 1997 manifesto, along with numerous changes in the 1990s like the progressive dismissal of traditional social democratic ideology and the transformation into New Labour, de-emphasising the need to tackle economic inequality and focusing instead on the expansion of opportunities for any whilst fostering social capital.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is cited as a Third Way politician. According to a former unit of Blair's staff, Blair andthe Labour Party learnt from and owes a debt to Bob Hawke's government in Australia in the 1980s on how to govern as a Third Way party. Blair wrote in a Fabian pamphlet in 1994 of the existence of two prominent variants of socialism, namely one based on a Marxist–Leninist economic determinist and collectivist tradition and the other being an ethical socialism based on values of "social justice, the equal worth of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things citizen, equality of opportunity, community". Blair is a particular follower of the ideas and writings of Giddens.