I grew up in the Ruhrgebiet, Germany’s industrial heartland. In those coal-and-steel cities, the Social Democrats, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, were not just a political party. They were the natural order. In my home region, the SPD regularly pulled more than 50 percent of the vote.
My own political journey took me elsewhere. Classical liberalism became my personal philosophy because I came to believe it better served the things I always cared about: people being able to get ahead, earn a decent living and build something for their families. But what is happening to the SPD still fills me with sadness, and with worry for Germany’s democratic future.
The SPD is Germany’s oldest political party. Its roots reach back to 1863, eight years before Bismarck unified the German nation-state. Bismarck tried to crush it and failed. The party survived the Kaiser, two world wars and twelve years of Nazi dictatorship.
On 23 March 1933, just weeks after an arson attack gutted the Reichstag building, the German parliament met in a Berlin opera house. Hitler’s brownshirts, his personal paramilitary force, filled the aisles to intimidate anyone who might vote the wrong way.
SPD chairman Otto Wels rose to speak against the Enabling Act, the law that would let Hitler’s government rule without parliamentary consent. Every other party, including the Catholic Centre, voted yes.
Only the SPD voted no, with dozens of its deputies already in prison or exile. “Freedom and life can be taken from us, but not our honour,” Wels told the chamber. It was the last free speech in a German parliament for thirteen years.
A quarter-century later, at a party congress in Bad Godesberg in 1959, the SPD reinvented itself. It dropped Marxism, accepted the market economy and transformed from a class party into a broad-church Volkspartei. “As much competition as possible, as much planning as necessary” was the formula.
It reconciled millions of German workers with liberal democracy. Without Godesberg, there would have been no Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Brandt had fled the Nazis as a young man and spent the war years in Norwegian exile. He returned to the country that had persecuted him, served as West Berlin’s mayor when the Wall went up in 1961, and eventually became chancellor. Charismatic and fiercely anti-totalitarian, his biography alone told Germans that their democracy was worth defending.
His successor as chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, was a different kind of leader. Where Brandt inspired, Schmidt governed. He knew every world leader on first-name terms, managed the crises of the 1970s with cool authority, and remained a respected voice on world affairs long after leaving office.
In my home state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau served as state premier for twenty years, holding together workers, Catholics and progressives through warmth and decency.
Then came Gerhard Schröder, the last SPD leader anyone would call a statesman. His ‘Agenda 2010’ reforms overhauled Germany’s sclerotic labour market and welfare system. They also destroyed his party.
The SPD never explained the reforms to its own voters. By the time the economy recovered, those voters had already left. Die Linke, a new party born from rage at the cuts, captured the SPD’s left flank.
Schröder’s greatest achievement thus became the party’s suicide note. His later entanglement with Putin and Gazprom tainted even his real accomplishments.
After Schröder, the SPD lost its bearings. Three Grand Coalitions under Angela Merkel turned it into a permanent junior partner with nothing distinctive to say.
The party elite became urban, university-educated and culturally progressive. Its traditional voters were none of these things.
Urban progressives found a home with the Greens, while blue-collar workers went to the far-right Alternative for Germany, the AfD. The SPD was left speaking to a shrinking middle.
Then the SPD fell silent on immigration. In the Ruhrgebiet, deindustrialisation had hollowed out old communities. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East changed these cities further. Traditional SPD voters felt like strangers in their own neighbourhoods.
Anyone in the party who raised these concerns risked being called a racist. So, the party said nothing, and voters who wanted someone to listen found the AfD.
Olaf Scholz was the final indignity. Where Brandt had charisma and Schmidt had competence and Schröder had nerve, Scholz offered nothing. His traffic-light coalition collapsed in late 2024.
None of this is unique to Germany. France’s Parti Socialiste collapsed to 6 percent in the 2017 presidential election. From the Dutch Labour Party to New Zealand Labour, centre-left parties across the West are losing the voters they were built to represent. But no party with the SPD’s history has fallen so far, so fast.
In last month’s Baden-Württemberg state election, the SPD got 5.5 percent, its worst result in any German state since 1945. Among manual workers there, just 5 percent voted SPD but thirty-seven percent voted AfD.
Two weeks later, the party lost Rhineland-Palatinate after 35 years in power. In the industrial cities of Kaiserslautern and Ludwigshafen, places the SPD once owned, the AfD surged to 19.5 percent, its best ever result in western Germany.
Nationally, the SPD now sits at 14 percent. Lars Klingbeil, the party’s co-leader who doubles as Finance Minister and Deputy Chancellor, called the result “catastrophic” but refused to resign. The Jusos, the party’s youth wing, openly revolted. Nobody had a plan.
This is not just the SPD’s problem. For most of its history, German democracy rested on a contest between two big parties: the centre-right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD. When one grew complacent, the other was ready.
That architecture is broken. The political landscape has fragmented into six or seven parties, several that nobody will form a government with. The AfD cannot serve as a democratic alternative because every other party refuses to work with it.
The once-proud party that voted against Hitler, that reconciled workers with democracy at Bad Godesberg, that produced Brandt and Schmidt and Schröder, is fighting for survival.
I stopped supporting the SPD long ago. My values did not change, but I came to believe they were better served by other ideas. I never imagined I would grieve for the party I left behind.
That old calendar is still in a box at my parents’ house in Germany, and the red letters have not faded. Yet the world they belonged to has.
If the SPD loses its fight for survival, what fills the void?
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE
The SPD is Germany’s oldest political party. Its roots reach back to 1863, eight years before Bismarck unified the German nation-state. Bismarck tried to crush it and failed. The party survived the Kaiser, two world wars and twelve years of Nazi dictatorship.
On 23 March 1933, just weeks after an arson attack gutted the Reichstag building, the German parliament met in a Berlin opera house. Hitler’s brownshirts, his personal paramilitary force, filled the aisles to intimidate anyone who might vote the wrong way.
SPD chairman Otto Wels rose to speak against the Enabling Act, the law that would let Hitler’s government rule without parliamentary consent. Every other party, including the Catholic Centre, voted yes.
Only the SPD voted no, with dozens of its deputies already in prison or exile. “Freedom and life can be taken from us, but not our honour,” Wels told the chamber. It was the last free speech in a German parliament for thirteen years.
A quarter-century later, at a party congress in Bad Godesberg in 1959, the SPD reinvented itself. It dropped Marxism, accepted the market economy and transformed from a class party into a broad-church Volkspartei. “As much competition as possible, as much planning as necessary” was the formula.
It reconciled millions of German workers with liberal democracy. Without Godesberg, there would have been no Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Brandt had fled the Nazis as a young man and spent the war years in Norwegian exile. He returned to the country that had persecuted him, served as West Berlin’s mayor when the Wall went up in 1961, and eventually became chancellor. Charismatic and fiercely anti-totalitarian, his biography alone told Germans that their democracy was worth defending.
His successor as chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, was a different kind of leader. Where Brandt inspired, Schmidt governed. He knew every world leader on first-name terms, managed the crises of the 1970s with cool authority, and remained a respected voice on world affairs long after leaving office.
In my home state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau served as state premier for twenty years, holding together workers, Catholics and progressives through warmth and decency.
Then came Gerhard Schröder, the last SPD leader anyone would call a statesman. His ‘Agenda 2010’ reforms overhauled Germany’s sclerotic labour market and welfare system. They also destroyed his party.
The SPD never explained the reforms to its own voters. By the time the economy recovered, those voters had already left. Die Linke, a new party born from rage at the cuts, captured the SPD’s left flank.
Schröder’s greatest achievement thus became the party’s suicide note. His later entanglement with Putin and Gazprom tainted even his real accomplishments.
After Schröder, the SPD lost its bearings. Three Grand Coalitions under Angela Merkel turned it into a permanent junior partner with nothing distinctive to say.
The party elite became urban, university-educated and culturally progressive. Its traditional voters were none of these things.
Urban progressives found a home with the Greens, while blue-collar workers went to the far-right Alternative for Germany, the AfD. The SPD was left speaking to a shrinking middle.
Then the SPD fell silent on immigration. In the Ruhrgebiet, deindustrialisation had hollowed out old communities. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East changed these cities further. Traditional SPD voters felt like strangers in their own neighbourhoods.
Anyone in the party who raised these concerns risked being called a racist. So, the party said nothing, and voters who wanted someone to listen found the AfD.
Olaf Scholz was the final indignity. Where Brandt had charisma and Schmidt had competence and Schröder had nerve, Scholz offered nothing. His traffic-light coalition collapsed in late 2024.
None of this is unique to Germany. France’s Parti Socialiste collapsed to 6 percent in the 2017 presidential election. From the Dutch Labour Party to New Zealand Labour, centre-left parties across the West are losing the voters they were built to represent. But no party with the SPD’s history has fallen so far, so fast.
In last month’s Baden-Württemberg state election, the SPD got 5.5 percent, its worst result in any German state since 1945. Among manual workers there, just 5 percent voted SPD but thirty-seven percent voted AfD.
Two weeks later, the party lost Rhineland-Palatinate after 35 years in power. In the industrial cities of Kaiserslautern and Ludwigshafen, places the SPD once owned, the AfD surged to 19.5 percent, its best ever result in western Germany.
Nationally, the SPD now sits at 14 percent. Lars Klingbeil, the party’s co-leader who doubles as Finance Minister and Deputy Chancellor, called the result “catastrophic” but refused to resign. The Jusos, the party’s youth wing, openly revolted. Nobody had a plan.
This is not just the SPD’s problem. For most of its history, German democracy rested on a contest between two big parties: the centre-right CDU/CSU and the centre-left SPD. When one grew complacent, the other was ready.
That architecture is broken. The political landscape has fragmented into six or seven parties, several that nobody will form a government with. The AfD cannot serve as a democratic alternative because every other party refuses to work with it.
The once-proud party that voted against Hitler, that reconciled workers with democracy at Bad Godesberg, that produced Brandt and Schmidt and Schröder, is fighting for survival.
I stopped supporting the SPD long ago. My values did not change, but I came to believe they were better served by other ideas. I never imagined I would grieve for the party I left behind.
That old calendar is still in a box at my parents’ house in Germany, and the red letters have not faded. Yet the world they belonged to has.
If the SPD loses its fight for survival, what fills the void?
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE
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