Um, nice quote mine? Here's what it actually says in full:
For all their Che Guevara t-shirts and red flags, their programmes are only slightly to the left of the mainstream and willingly respect market constraints every bit as much as their centre-left cousins when they enter into government coalitions, as Die Linke did in Berlin).
Single-issue groups are enjoying their brief Warholian fifteen minutes, as with Sweden’s Pirate Party (who, nevertheless, have eclipsed the SAP in membership) or the Netherlands’ Party for the Animals, but these are unlikely to ever have serious influence at a national or European level.
No, it is abstentionism and apathy that have won out.
As the centre-right and centre-left become increasingly indistinguishable on the economic front, partisanship has dematerialised and family, workplace, neighbourhood and certainly class traditions of voting for a particular party are dead. We simply cannot predict who will vote for whom anymore, or even if they will bother to vote.
There has also been a sharp drop and hollowing out of membership, in particular of activists from working class communities, while a professionalisation has set in, with characters dominating internally who have never had a job outside politics and are entirely removed from the ever-mounting pressures of real life.
Moreover, if we take a wider view than simply focussing on the electoral realm, social democracy is in decline on the industrial front as well.
Confronted with outsourcing, social dumping and de-industrialisation since the eighties, a trade union leadership on the defensive has tended to defend the gains of its existing and aging membership rather than attempt to extend the circle of those benefitting to immigrants in domestic sweatshops or the new, often hyper-educated precariat working in call-centres, Starbucks or low-wage IT-mills.
Trade union membership is slipping and most young people today while not actively anti-union, believe that joining a union is something their granddad did.
Etc. You didn't read it did you and assumed they meant the center-right was more like the center-left, didn't you?
My last link says:
With their self-confidence in shambles and the “renewal fraction” running the show (“renewal” always seems to be associated with a rightward turn), the Social Democrats are running a fairly conservative campaign. They are banking on the fact that enough people are dissatisfied with the conservative government to vote them out. The SAP platform opposes additional tax cuts but has ruled out tax increases, on the grounds that Swedes have gotten used to the reduced level of taxation and raising it would be a political mistake. They say they oppose venture capitalists in the public sector, but won’t kick them out because they are now a fact of life. And so on.
The Swedish election is full of sound and fury. But the two major parties are, in effect, like those characters in film comedies who don’t really want to fight each other. They may scream and yell, but they ask their friends to hold them back so they can do it from a distance. “If these other guys weren’t stopping me, I’d show you a thing or two!”
While 80–90% of the population wants a stronger welfare state nobody is really running on that platform besides the Left Party, which at 7% has little to show for it. This dulling of political conflict has allowed the Sweden Democrats to gain over 10% of the polls through their single-minded focus on opposing immigration. This is somewhat strange considering Swedes’ generally positive views on immigration. Polls show that less than 4% of the population thinks that immigration to Sweden is too high.
Etc