THE NEW SOCIAL DEMOCRATS
CAN THE SPD
LION ADD BITE TO ITS ROAR?
Victor
Grossman,
It recalled
ancient Greek tragedies. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), founded
in the 19th Century, is the country’s oldest party, and now its
saddest one. On September 27th it
suffered its worst election defeat since 1897, losing six million former voters
and ending up with only 23 percent of the vote. It had been in government
office for eleven years, as boss with the Greens under Gerhard Schroeder and as
junior partner under Angela Merkel since 2005. Now it must share the less
glorious opposition seats in the Bundestag with the Greens, as rivals, and the
frequently despised and feared Left party. What a disastrous comedown for a
once proud party!
What caused
this loss? And how does the SPD plan to stem the hemorrhage of members and
voters? The first question is easily answered. It betrayed its traditional
base, the working people and the underprivileged. Cutting deep gashes in a once
exemplary health system, pushing the retirement age up to 67, passing Draconian
measures against the millions who lose their jobs, raising consumer taxes while
cutting taxes on the wealthy and spending billions on weapon systems and armed
expeditions to the Mediterranean, the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan, it either
initiated such measures as government leader or continued them as Merkel’s
junior partner. Any timid doubts by its rickety left wing were dispatched with
Schroeder’s fabled “Basta” – “Enough of that” - and
threats to withdraw needed support in the next elections. The habit of many SPD
cabinet ministers, including Schroeder, to get top positions in big companies
when they left office added additional color to the picture. Even a political
imbecile could predict the backlash, if not its magnitude. In September it was
the voters’ turn to say “Basta”!
How can the
catastrophe be overcome? A recent congress in
Among
philosophers, “Buridan’s ass” refers to an undecided
donkey standing halfway between two equal bales of hay and starving to death.
If the SPD were really to verge leftward it would approach the positions of The
Left, the very party it had ridiculed, denounced and, whenever possible,
ostracized. But keeping in the right lane (benignly called the moderate
course by the media) meant losing even more members and voters to that young
party, which had already overtaken it in four out of five East German states,
now too in Berlin, if only by a few noses, and was beginning to challenge it in
the western states as well. But if it were to become a genuine opposition
party, more or less leftish, it must further adopt –
or plagiarize – the positions of The Left, without seeming to approach it too
closely or losing its identity as a supporter of the “social market economy”.
It feared being exposed to nasty red-baiting from the governing Christian
Democrats and pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) as an ally of The Left. Then,
too, it could not ignore the hundreds of thousands of Euros from golden
sponsors like Daimler, BMW, Porsche or the Deutsche Bank - or risk losing them.
The congress in
Dresden seemed to indicate that its new leaders, many of them carryovers from
the past, will continue to act like toothless old lions, making roaring noises,
but not all too loud. For example, when worried grass roots voices
demanded that the SPD reverse its policy of postponing retirement pensions from
65 to 67, a key issue in unemployment-plagued Germany, the party’s new
Secretary General, Andrea Nahles, who still has the
progressive-looking smile she once adopted when she was really on the left in
the party, but little else now than the smile, warned that “a quick change
toward switching from 67 back to 65 would be completely unconvincing” and added
vaguely, “We must develop a policy which hinders poverty in old age.” To switch
feline metaphors, it did not seem likely that this leopard could change its
spots.
Meanwhile the
new government of Angela Merkel and Guido Westerwelle,
the clever FDP boss, vice-chancellor and foreign minister, was busy hatching
out plans for its attacks on welfare. There was some debate on the issue of
taxes – how soon and how much the wealthy should get away with, how best and
how soon health care could be cut, whether the retirement age could be raised
even further – and other such goodies. On most issues it appeared that the FDP
is even further to the right than the Christian Democrats. It also appears that
the worst is yet to come – after the crucial May elections in
North-Rhine-Westphalia, the state with the biggest population and worst rust
belt in western
After the
elections the government will most likely wield its axe in earnest. To oppose
it, and despite all former animosities, some kind of unity between the three
opposition parties, the SPD, the Greens and The Left, would seem more
urgent than ever. Only in
Oskar Lafontaine played a key part in bringing together the older
PDS in
Above and
beyond personality issues, however, so important they can be: will the economic
situation and government attacks on the welfare of most Germans be enough to
achieve some kind of unity in opposition, not only with political parties but
with student, ecology, gay, anti-globalization and above all the labor movements?
The question is crucial for everyone, but above all for the battered SPD. Some
say that its 23 percent vote marked rock bottom, and
now look to an upturn. Others fear an even deeper abyss.