94Ha ViewpointThe fear of being economically and socially abandoned has proven to be a powerful motivator for Trump and the AfD. As long as the Social Democrats fail to dispel this fear, the far right will continue to exploit it. If the center-left parties want to regain their position, they must face up to and analyze the reasons for their electoral defeat and declining support.
The German Social Democratic Party is one of the oldest political parties in the West. It once advocated parliamentary democracy, opposed Nazism, and led the modernization process in post-war Germany. In addition to the many eye-catching labor, economic and human rights reforms it has implemented over the years, the “Eastern Policy” (Ostpolitik) proposed by former SPD leader and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s also laid the foundation for Germany’s reunification in 1990.
However, the SPD is no longer what it used to be: in the federal election on February 23, it won only 16.4% of the vote, lagging behind the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union and the far-right AfD. It is worth considering how this defeat came about and what it means for the future of social democracy in the West.
The SPD’s popularity began to decline in the late 2000s. In the 2005 and 2009 federal elections, the SPD received 34.2% and 23% of the vote respectively, a sharp drop from the nearly 41% of the vote it received in the 1998 federal election. This decline can be largely attributed to the “2010 Agenda” and “Hartz Reforms” promoted by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s. Schröder’s neoliberal social program sought to revive the stagnant German economy by deregulating the labor market and reducing welfare. This put the SPD on a collision course with its working-class voter base under strong trade unions, and also led to the charismatic finance minister and former party leader Oskar Lafontaine defecting to the Left Alliance with his party’s socialist wing.
Despite the voter loss, the SPD, as the junior coalition partner to its main rival, the CDU/CSU, can still rest easy under the leadership of Germany’s “Iron Lady” Angela Merkel. When Merkel retires in 2021, the SPD won a quarter of Germans’ votes in that year’s election. But its leader, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, has been forced to form a “traffic light coalition” (so named for the party colors) with the Greens and the liberal, market-oriented Free Democratic Party. This has led his government to pursue a number of conflicting goals: promoting social justice and lowering taxes; building social housing and strengthening support for entrepreneurs; tackling climate change and protecting Germany’s auto industry. Such a broad agenda will do little to win back workers’ trust, especially as fears about globalization grow.
Scholz’s party misjudged voter concerns
Before the recent election, neither Scholz nor his party seemed to have accurately judged the main concerns of German voters. According to the ARD-DeutschlandTREND survey by German pollster Infratest dimap, 37% of Germans believe that immigration is the most important issue facing Germany, and the SPD has been contradictory and indecisive on this issue. The SPD secretly supported Merkel’s open-door policy in 2015, allowing Germany to accept more than 1 million asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. However, Scholz advocated the deportation of “serious criminals” to Syria and Afghanistan after several terrorist attacks. This muddled approach to immigration and security issues has not only failed to win voter support, but has also reinforced the claim of the anti-immigrant AfD that the “Muslim threat theory” has always been correct.
In the Infratest dimap survey, the second most important issue for voters was the economy, with 34% of respondents believing that this should be the government’s top priority. But as a recent article on Scholz in Der Spiegel pointed out, the German economy shrank for the second consecutive year in 2024, with rising unemployment, layoffs in industry and falling consumer confidence. All this happened under Scholz, undermining the image he had created as a successful economic manager under Merkel. This led to a sharp drop in working-class support for the SPD. Infratest dimap exit polls showed the AfD winning 38% of the workers’ vote, while the SPD received just 12%.
Scholz fell short in other areas as well. His much-vaunted turning point (Zeitenwende) in foreign policy and national security after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 did not materialize. Germany barely met NATO’s 2% defense spending target and failed to live up to its commitments to Ukraine. As Benjamin Tallis, a European security analyst, concluded in a report for the German Council on Foreign Relations titled “The End of the Zeitenwende,” Scholz’s plan was a failure.
The SPD’s electoral defeat is reminiscent of the Democratic Party’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election in the United States. Neither party has responded effectively to immigration, won over working-class voters, or enacted major progressive economic reforms. Instead, they have chosen to emphasize cultural liberalism, which appeals to the winners of globalization—those who don’t have to worry about their future.
But the fear of being economically and socially left behind has proven to be a powerful motivator for Trump and the AfD. As long as the Social Democrats fail to allay that fear, the far right will continue to exploit it. If the center-left parties want to regain their footing, they must confront and analyze the causes of their electoral defeats and declining support, while finding new ways to win over workers and protect them from deindustrialization, automation, and artificial intelligence.
