What on earth are the comrades up to?
Despite their much-vaunted PR skills, and their ability, domestically at least, to ensure that all are "on message", trying to work out what Europe's "red tide" of socialist leaders represents, and, indeed, what the message may be, is by no means easy.
Perhaps the problem is that they don't know themselves. If they are singing off the same hymn sheet, it is in different keys.
Significantly, last weekend close advisers to both the British and German leaders sat down together for the first of a series of meetings aimed at putting flesh on the "Third Way" or "Neue Mitte" (loosely, the new centre).
Chaired by Peter Mandelson, the British Trade and Industry Secretary, and Bodo Hombach, minister-without-portfolio in the new German government and the closest ally in Bonn of the Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, the high-level group is expected to work on ideas about popularising the EU and exchanging best practice in economic reform.
In Brussels at the same time socialist finance ministers were working on two papers on increased economic co-ordination. The majority view there that they should move to greater tax harmonisation produced a sharp rift; but the course of true love never did run smooth.
Thirteen EU governments now have a socialist component, 11 are led by socialists, and the predictable scare stories have begun to emerge in the conservative press throughout the EU about profligate Keynesians determined to tear up the Stability Pact and spend their way out of the crisis.
The deeply eurosceptical European weekly has even run a story suggesting that the revolutionaries of 1969 have now stormed the barricades and are firmly in control of Europe. One of those fearlessly "exposed" by the paper is none other than the architect of New Labourism, Mr Mandelson! But red scare nonsense notwithstanding, the socialists are, most definitely, different from what went before.
Derek McDowell, Irish Labour's finance spokesman, says his strongest impression of Sunday's meeting of socialist finance ministers was of the dynamism injected by Germany's new Finance Minister, Oskar Lafontaine, and of the latter's single-mindedness about making a real, and identifiably socialist difference to the EU, particularly on employment.
The problem is how to do it without scaring the horses.
For some time the economic policies of the socialist parties of Europe have been deeply wedded to the Maastricht model of fiscal discipline and deficit-cutting, even embracing such heresies as the independence of central banks. There is no question of moving outside this strait-jacket, as they reiterated at the euro-11 meeting on Monday.
Yet there appears to be a growing consensus that more can be done within it. Interest rate levels have been seen as a particular bugbear and both France's Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Mr Lafontaine have been arguing that independence of the ECB is not incompatible with a real dialogue and partnership with governments - the not-too-terrifying example of the US Fed is cited as an example of a bank whose remit is both control of inflation and the stimulation of jobs.
Ms Strauss-Kahn argues for a form of compact with the central bankers in which governments commit themselves to tighter fiscal policies in return for rate cuts.
And the ECB could be made more accountable by requiring it to publish, some time after the event, explanations of its decisions on interest rate policy, much as the Bank of England does. Sunday's meeting is understood to have suggested such a move once the single currency is up and running in a few months.
There is also a greater willingness to use investment to stimulate employment growth both at domestic level and at EU level through expanding the resources of the European Investment Bank or rekindling the stalled transEuropean infrastructure network projects through public-private partnerships.
The former Commission president, Jacques Delors, managed to broker an uneasy peace between left and right in the EU with his emphasis on structural reform of labour markets.
Eschewing the completely hands-off approach for Europe advocated by Baroness Thatcher and her like, and the left's traditional neo-Keynesian reflation, Mr Delors forged a consensus around the need to address the structural inflexibilities that mean growth in the EU has been particularly poor at generating jobs.
That message had been accepted as the orthodoxy by socialists and is still very much the focus of New Labour's and Mr Schroder's preoccupations.
But Mr Lafontaine also argues for what might be called a "Delors Plus" programme. His right-hand man, the State Secretary for the Economy, Heiner Flassbeck, says bluntly: "I don't believe that unemployment is the result of purely structural problems, as maintained by the central banks."
Hence the interest of some of the socialists in the argument being put by the Single Market Commissioner, Mario Monti, that the euro's Stability Pact explicitly distinguishes between deficits resulting from current and capital spending.
What is clear is that the socialist project for Europe and its economy is still very much a work-in-progress reflecting a variety of preoccupations, sometimes contradictory, between and within member-states. What Tony Blair signalled in Portschach recently as a change of emphasis from fear of inflation to fear of deflation is beginning to acquire flesh.
