quarta-feira, 30 de março de 2016

The fall and fall of German social democracy


The fall and fall of German social democracy
The SPD has lost voters to the left and the right, and needs to get them back fast to avoid becoming irrelevant.

By JANOSCH DELCKER 3/30/16, 5:33 AM CET

BERLIN — It’s not just Angela Merkel’s conservatives who are licking their wounds after a crushing defeat in German regional elections — the Social Democratic party is hurting too, and badly.

The major losses the SPD suffered in two of the three German states that held elections this month plunged a party that had been in steady decline for years into the worst crisis in its post-war history.

Nowhere illustrates the SPD’s woes as vividly as Mannheim I. For the first time in 64 years, the working-class electoral district on the outskirts of Mannheim, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, is no longer in SPD control.

Not only that, the SPD lost Mannheim I to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).

“This loss really hurts,” Ralf Stegner, deputy national leader of the SPD said in an interview.

Local SPD leaders believe voters punished the SPD for decisions taken in Berlin, where the party is the junior coalition partner of Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

“We are the ones who take the hit because the national government in Berlin promises things and afterwards doesn’t deliver,” said Andrea Safferling, one of the SPD’s candidates in Mannheim I.

Aside from the charismatic Malu Dreyer in Rhineland-Palatinate, the Social Democrats suffered defeats across the board, finishing a humiliating fourth in Baden-Württemberg and Saxony-Anhalt. Nationally, the party’s support has slumped to 22 percent from 38 percent in 2002.

Looking its age

For 150 years the SPD, Germany’s oldest party, has promoted social justice and the rights of the working class. In recent years, it has been losing voters to parties on the far-right and the far-left — voters who feel the party has lost touch with its core values.

Safferling felt the disenchantment first-hand when campaigning before the recent election. The dissatisfaction, she believes, is mostly due to the SPD’s support for Merkel’s controversial migration policy.

The SPD’s decline predates the AfD and the migration crisis by years.
“In a constituency like ours … I am being told ‘We don’t have a lot of money, but our government is spending all the money on refugees,’” Safferling said.

“They have heard about Austria capping the number of refugees and then they ask us, “Why is this working for the Austrians, and not for us?’” she added.

Daring to speak out in support of the “open doors” migration policy can have worrying consequences. Safferling said that after speaking out against the AfD, which campaigned with great success on an anti-migrant platform, a swastika was spray-painted onto her car.

The SPD’s decline predates the AfD and the migration crisis by years.

“This downward spiral began with [Gerhard] Schröder’s Agenda 2010,” Safferling said, referring to the reform program the former SPD chancellor launched in 2003. It targeted Germany’s welfare system and its labor market to boost economic growth and reduce unemployment in a country that was dubbed the “sick man of Europe” at the time.

Many SPD supporters said Schröder’s reform plan, which included cuts to pensions and unemployment benefits, trampled on the party’s core values.

“We have lost so many supporters because people don’t trust anymore that we are truly committed to social justice,” said Stegner, who is at the far-left of the party. “It’s difficult to reverse this, and it’s a slow process.”

Left behind

Many of those who have abandoned the SPD because of Agenda 2010 have gone to the Left party.

“Questions of fair distribution of money and resources are no longer at the forefront of social democratic politics,” said Matthias Micus, a political scientist at the University of Göttingen.

“Being ‘left’ the way the SPD understands it today is no longer primarily about economic questions, but much more about cultural issues like gender politics, the protection of minorities, or when it comes to cultural diversity or immigration,” Micus said.

However, he added, the traditional SPD electorate — the working class — does not really care about those topics.

“This has led to an estrangement of the SPD from its traditional electorate,” Micus said.

It’s about more than policy, there’s personality problems too.

While the party has a few rising stars on the state level — alongside Malu Dreyer there are the popular state premiers Hannelore Kraft in North Rhine-Westphalia and Olaf Scholz in Hamburg — it lacks popular figures on the national stage.

Sigmar Gabriel, the vice chancellor, economy minister and SPD chief, is seen by many as a fickle provocateur and is deeply unpopular, even among the party faithful.

Only 14 percent of voters in Germany would like to see Gabriel as chancellor, compared to 50 percent who approve of Merkel. Even among SPD voters, only 36 percent would like to see Gabriel as chancellor versus 38 percent who favor Merkel, according to a recent Forsa poll.

Yet Gabriel’s position at the top of the SPD remains unchallenged. The main reason is that the SPD’s candidate for chancellor in 2017 has no chance of winning and is viewed as a kamikaze mission, party officials say privately.

That may well be the reason why the popular Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Labor Minister Andrea Naples are not exactly pushing hard to get their names on the ballot paper, leaving Gabriel alone at the forefront of the party.

In February, he annoyed Merkel by demanding greater social spending on Germans to balance out the costs of increased spending on refugees.

It was his attempt to distance the SPD from Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union.

“Of course we want to make sure people see the difference between us and the conservative parties,” said the SPD’s Stegner. “If Germany’s two large parties are being perceived as too similar, people tend to cast a protest vote for more extreme parties, or they don’t vote at all.”

“Over the last couple of months, people have begun to understand how important it is to distance ourselves more from the union parties,” Stegner added, “and days like [March 13] are yet another warning signal.”

Roughly 500 kilometres from Berlin, in northern Mannheim, Andrea Safferling sometimes thinks about withdrawing from local politics. But deep in her heart, she says, she is too much of a Social Democrat to throw away decades of unpaid party work.

Berlin needs to make sure more money is available for local communities, she says, so that she can go back to focusing on the core issues of Social Democratic politics, like expanding childcare facilities, providing affordable inner-city housing and fixing potholes in the streets of Mannheim.


The SPD needs to climb out of its own hole before it can start fixing others.

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