NICOLAS MESSYASZ/Sipa via AP Images
German Social Democratic Party leader Olaf Scholz in Paris, September 6, 2021
In the most recent issue of the Prospect, I published a feature piece on the collapse of European social democracy. The prime culprit, I argued, was the embrace by the self-described “center-left” of neoliberalism and austerity, leaving frustrated and unrepresented working people to embrace the far right or to vote for conservatives on the basis of cultural issues.
In the past few weeks, due mainly to some lucky random events that could portend deeper shifts, there is a break in this pattern. And it is happening in Germany, where the slide of the venerable Social Democratic Party, the SPD, has been among Europe’s steepest.
Germany, ending the long reign of retiring Chancellor Angela Merkel, has general elections on September 26. And the left looks primed to win. The question is: What sort of left?
In the last federal election, of 2017, the SPD won just 20.5 percent of the vote, its worst showing in a century. But after running third in the polls all year behind both Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Green Party, the Social Democrats are now in first place and they gain ground with each succeeding poll.
There is a good chance that the SPD leader, Olaf Scholz, will be the next chancellor, and a decent chance that he could preside over a left coalition made up of his own party plus the Greens, and the further left party, Die Linke (which means The Left).
How did this twist come about?
Basically, Scholz, a former mayor of Hamburg and longtime SPD warhorse, has emerged as far more attractive and plausible as chancellor than his opponents. Paradoxically, he seems the most like Merkel, at a time when German voters seem to want continuity.
As recently as early summer, when the Greens were running first in the polls, Germans were imagining a Green-led coalition. But Green leader Annalena Baerbock, who has never held government office, has repeatedly stumbled during the campaign.
Scholz, a former mayor of Hamburg and longtime SPD warhorse, has emerged as far more attractive and plausible as chancellor than his opponents.
It came out that she plagiarized portions of her recent book and padded parts of her résumé. She also delayed paying taxes on a large Christmas bonus, and used a racial slur during a debate. She apologized for each of these lapses, but she does not seem believable as a chancellor, and is dragging down her party.
The CDU and its Bavarian partner, the CSU, enjoyed unity under the popular Merkel. But the post-Merkel center-right is now badly fragmented. Their candidate, Armin Laschet, who is premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, emerged as a compromise party leader after the political collapse of Merkel’s handpicked successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, in February 2020. In recent debates, viewers rated Laschet as a weak third.
Within the SPD, Scholz is considered a centrist, but the party itself has been moving to the left and disavowing its neoliberal detour. At the party’s general conference in 2019, the SPD elected two leftists as co-chairs, both of whom have explicitly rejected the SPD’s disastrous strategy of being a junior coalition partner to Merkel and the package of anti-worker policies of former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder, known as Hartz IV.
Party co-chair Saskia Esken declared, “We were the party that introduced Hartz IV, we are the party that overcomes Hartz IV.” The SPD later turned to Scholz, a moderate, as a more electable candidate for chancellor, but he is reliant on its resurgent progressives, rather the way Joe Biden is in the U.S.
This matters, because if the SPD, as expected, wins the most votes but well short of a parliamentary majority, it will face a choice of two possible coalitions. The polls suggest that the SPD plus the Greens plus the center-right Free Democratic Party (FDP), now showing about 11 percent of the vote, will together have a comfortable majority in the Bundestag.
However, a very different coalition of the SPD, the Greens, and Die Linke could also win a narrower governing majority. Scholz, pressed on the point in debate, refused to rule that out.
This is a major breakthrough in German politics. Die Linke was formed in 2007 after a breakaway of progressive Social Democrats outraged by Schröder’s neoliberal turn. They combined with ex-communists from the former DDR to create the new left party.
Such is the bitterness on the part of many SPD leaders that a coalition with Die Linke has been verboten at the federal level, though there have been three such state coalitions. The split happened nearly a whole generation ago. Maybe enough time has gone by for that ban to be lifted.
The alternative, a coalition with the ultra-free-market, pro-austerity FDP, would be a disaster. It would only reinforce the SPD’s unfortunate recent history as a centrist party that slowly bleeds working-class support.
It would be reminiscent of the current Israeli government—a coalition of opposites whose only common feature is detestation of Netanyahu. An ideologically incoherent German coalition of the SPD, the Greens, and the FDP would have in common only that it isn’t led by the CDU. That’s not good enough.
Sometimes random events, such as the weakness of the Green and CDU candidates, can be major turning points with structural consequences. A left coalition would have four years to alter German policy and politics. But such moments have to be seized, or the dead hand of the past persists.
