Germany’s center left is on the brink of oblivion

John Kampfner is a British author, broadcaster and commentator. His new book, “Braver New World: The Countries Daring to Do Things Others Won’t,” will be published in April. He is a regular POLITICO columnist.

“It is up to us to determine whether Germany will remain a strong country. No one else gets to decide. Not the White House, not the Great Hall of the People — and certainly not the Kremlin. We decide,” declared Lars Klingbeil, Germany’s vice chancellor, minister of finance and co-leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

“Doing this will pose challenges for each and every one of us. We will have to break habits, overcome gridlock; 2026 will require courage,” he added.

But has the floundering man with three jobs finally found his courage?

If he doesn’t want his party to disappear into the fringes, and possibly bring down the coalition with it — he needs to.

Let’s look at the numbers: 2026 is Germany’s “super-election-year,” and the SPD — Germany’s oldest party and possibly the oldest center-left party in the world — kicked things off by being trounced.

On March 8 the party received only 5.5 percent of the vote in the wealthy state of Baden-Württemberg — its worst result in postwar history — barely managing to surpass the 5 percent threshold for parliamentary representation. Two weeks later, in Rhineland-Palatinate, the party was decisively relegated to second place after 35 years in power, receiving its worst-ever election result in that state. Meanwhile, its national polling average has fallen to 15 percent.

All this for a party that has either run the government or been the junior partner for all but four years of the first quarter of this century.

What’s more, the SPD’s decline happened in plain sight, gradually but inexorably. Broadly speaking, the party’s younger, more metropolitan and socially liberal supporters drifted either to the Greens or, more recently, to the avowedly left-wing The Left party, while its socially conservative, anti-immigration voters in smaller towns opted for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

This has left an electoral rump comprised of state employees, welfare recipients and pensioners, or so the accusation goes. And it’s why — except for one notable period during the early 2000s — the SPD has been seen as the preserver of the status quo, the land of postwar milk and honey, immutable employment rights and generous benefits.

Interestingly, during that period of anomaly, when the party briefly followed a different path, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had uncharacteristically confronted shrinking growth and burgeoning state spending with reforms that included tax cuts, cuts to unemployment and an overall refashioning of welfare.

By the standards of Germany’s consensus-based politics, the changes were a bombshell. And while “Agenda 2010,” as the package was known, did revive the economy, it also saw the SPD lose power. Such was the controversy that although Schröder’s Christian Democrat successor, Chancellor Angela Merkel, kept the changes in place, she was careful not to promote them.

Today, a similar dynamic is back in play. An embattled SPD leadership is split between its traditional wing, which wants to preserve and enhance Germany’s vaunted “social market,” and those who believe it should support — and perhaps even own — a liberalizing reform agenda that the current government has fallen shy of thus far.

Klingbeil belongs in the latter camp, and yet his most immediate task has been to stabilize his position amid calls for his resignation, both from government and as party co-leader. One of the more popular alternatives floated in his stead has been Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who regularly polls as Germany’s favorite politician. But Pistorius has so far dismissed the idea: “Neither the party nor the coalition needs a debate about personnel right now,” he said.

Meanwhile, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is in a curious position: He wants to exploit the SPD’s weakness electorally but also to prop it up within the coalition. Hence, he told senior figures from his CDU party not to crow. But while Merz and Klingbeil have gotten along reasonably well since the government’s formation just under a year ago, they both know that their parties — separately and collectively — must start delivering on the domestic agenda.

The country’s non-starting “autumn of reforms” has already turned into the “spring of reforms,” with concrete proposals on several fronts yet to be reported. The initials results, on long-term care, are expected soon, followed by those on health care funding. After that, plans to reform the pension system are expected by June, so legislation can be drafted and submitted to parliament before it breaks for summer recess in July.

Normally, all this would be a tall order for the SPD. But “major reforms must take place,” Klingbeil admitted in a recent keynote speech, and they must lead to “lower taxes, lower levies, less bureaucracy, competitive energy prices. In short: A country where work is worthwhile again.”

This means the battle within the coalition will be focused on points of detail and priority that Merz and Klingbeil will argue over — both in private and performatively in public — to present their credentials to voters.

But a much bigger question still looms over the SPD, just as it does with similar social democratic groupings in other European countries, such as the U.K. Labour Party and France’s Socialists: Deciding — and declaring — what they actually stand for in the current political context.

These parties have all allowed themselves to be portrayed as overly cautious, looking over their shoulders to identify and forestall the first signs of trouble. Even when they enact radical reforms, they appear frightened by what they have unleashed and end up being punished for it. Then, they retreat into protection rather than innovation, and the vicious cycle continues.

For the SPD, nobody represented this tendency more clearly than former Chancellor Olaf Scholz — a man who never knowingly said or did anything that hadn’t first been risk-assessed to death. Even his one moment of note — his February 2022 Zeitenwende speech, signaling a historic turning point in terms of Russia, hard power and defense spending — quickly fizzled out.

Overall, as across most of the bloc, politics in Germany has grown increasingly bifurcated, with many voters looking for a clearer sense of definition from their politicians. And in this landscape, the SPD’s quiet incrementalism is in danger of being drowned out from both the left and right.

With some of their voters dying out and others simply losing patience, this party in omni-crisis has to decide, once and for all, what it stands for and who it represents. There are no easy choices here. But one thing is clear: Doing nothing and trying to muddle through will consign the SPD to oblivion.