John Kampfner is a British author, broadcaster and commentator. His latest book “In Search of Berlin” is published by Atlantic. He is a regular POLITICO columnist.
Friedrich Merz is Germany’s next chancellor. The adherents of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) believe tomorrow belongs to them. Meanwhile, The Left party is now the parliament’s radical new insurgent.
But what happens to the three political parties that ran Germany for the last four years — and technically still do until the next administration is ready? They’ve all been humbled. All of their figureheads are stepping down. So, how will they regroup in a landscape where polarization is the new normal?
For the Social Democrats (SPD), the challenge is the most immediate, the danger the most acute. One of Europe’s oldest political forces, the party’s history spans both world wars. Its role in German life has never been questioned, and because of how the country’s voting system functions, it’s regularly in government as either the leading or second party.
Barring a failure to agree on a new coalition deal in the coming weeks — something that would plunge Germany into crisis — the SPD will once again be in power, but it will be the (very) junior member of the Merz’s coalition. And as the Christian Democrat (CDU) chancellor has returned his party to its conservative roots, this one won’t be a government in the SPD’s image.
Neither party has much of a choice here, as the electoral arithmetic makes other coalition permutations almost impossible. And for the SPD, this will be make or break. If the next government fails to significantly deliver on its top priority — improving the standard of living, particularly for the less advantaged — it will face a possible wipeout, with the AfD sweeping up its remaining working-class support.
The SPD’s stunning all-time low result of 16.4 percent demonstrates the extent to which it’s being punished for the failures of the last administration. However, like many other established center-left parties across the world, for decades now, the SPD has failed to give a coherent sense of what it stands for and has been losing touch with its traditional voters. Support for the party first began to drop toward the end of the 2000s, with the SPD receiving 34 percent of the vote in the 2005 federal elections and 23 percent in 2009 — a drastic decline from 41 percent in 1998.
Nowadays, it would love to achieve even the lowest of those figures.
The SPD’s systemic problem is that the country’s needs and the party’s pitch face in opposite directions. When Scholz pledged €100 billion in defense spending and military support for Ukraine just days after Russia’s invasion began, he was going against a long tradition of Ostpolitik — a policy that saw Germany formalizing ties with the Soviet Union under the party’s most hallowed figure, former Chancellor Willy Brandt. Later, in the early 2000s, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder dispensed with the party’s deep-rooted welfarist approach, seeking to revive a stagnant economy by cutting benefits and deregulating labor markets. The very mention of these reforms prompts the fury of SPD old-timers, even to this day.
With the incoming Merz administration’s focus on more military spending, tax cuts, welfare cuts and migration curbs, the SPD’s pain will be even more acute. Even though Scholz will be out of the picture, the dilemmas faced by his party will remain. And what exactly does a center-left party stand for when both the far right and the far left can appropriate its voters?
The Greens, meanwhile, will now have a holiday from the terrible compromises required of governance, and can lick their wounds. A party synonymous with tackling climate change, the Greens relegated their central theme to an afterthought during their election campaign. And while that may have made immediate sense at the time, with climate activism being denounced by mainstream politicians and media alike, the tactic failed to galvanize the party’s core and to attract new voters.
The Greens’ principled position in support of Ukraine and defense spending also divided its members, some of whom still cling to the “salon pacifism” of old. With outgoing Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck calling time on his political career at the age of 55, left among the party’s so-called realos — its moderate wing — is outgoing Minister for Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock, who performed well under difficult circumstances. But we will now likely see the party’s fundis — its radical wing — use the “purity” of opposition to push a more uncompromising agenda.
Finally, we come to the Free Democrats (FDP), the third party of the soon-to-be-disbanded “traffic light” coalition. A party that now faces oblivion. For Germany, the FDP have always been a curiosity. Its starting point — pro-enterprise, low tax, low regulation — would be considered mainstream in many other countries, particularly Anglo-Saxon ones, but here in Germany, it’s long been regarded as a fringe position.
This isn’t the first time FDP failed to meet the 5 percent threshold required for representation in the Bundestag. But with Merz shunting the CDU away from its former centrism and toward more free-market principles, the FDP has nowhere to go. Out of parliament, the party will also have far less media exposure. But at least its leader, former Minister of Finance Christian Lindner — the guiltiest of the various guilty men (and yes, they were all men) who undermined the last government — will be gone.
When the Federal Republic was formed in 1949, it was to contain three parties: the CDU, the FDP and the SPD – representing the center left, middle and center right. The political space wouldn’t accommodate, let alone tolerate, others. The Greens then joined several decades later and have long been considered part of the political establishment. But now, everything has changed, and new parties on the extremes menace the status quo.
So, Merz has four to five years not just to breathe new life into the CDU, but to ensure the country’s political constellation isn’t broken for good.
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