The century dawned with an impressive constellation of traditionally forged progressive leaders in Europe: Blair, Schroeder, D’Alema, Jospin, Guterres and Kok among others. The president of the European Commission was Romano Prodi and the managing director of the IMF was Michel Camdessus, a Frenchman who had ties to his country’s socialists and who, alongside Parisian consensus figures like Delors and Lamy, had a profound influence on the post-1989 world. In the United States, Bill Clinton was in power. The second quarter of the 21^st century, however, dawns with a bleak outlook for European progressives, who hold executive power in only two major countries: the United Kingdom and Spain. What happened?

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There are images that never fade from a country’s memory, from its political and popular consciousness. One of them is that of Joschka Fischer (Gerabronn, Germany, 78 years old) wearing sneakers and being sworn in as a minister in the state of Hesse in 1985. For the first time, the Greens, a grassroots movement born a few years earlier, entered a regional government. It was a turning point. Thirteen years later, Fischer would become vice-chancellor and foreign minister in the first federal government with the Greens, allied with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic Party.

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