What’s up with the Social Democrats?
Commentaries on the german Social Democrats Party (SPD) are going nuts these days. Since losing the majority in the 2005 federal election, the oldest german party with more than 140 years of history is troubled. Most elections went down the drain, and the last one the SPD can claim to have won in the state of Hessen (Hesse) is leading into new trouble.
The former state party of the German Democratic Republic SED, later called PDS, has survived and can rely on some kind of trust especially of older people in the five eastern german states which formerly were the GDR. The SPD and the Green Party are more or less center-leftist parties, with a clear attitude towards the center of the system and partly even conservative. When some unionists and left wing politicians of the SPD left the party in 2005 to form a new party called WASG, the SPD was in deep trouble: the WASG was going to breed the ground in the western states of Germany. When former-communists of PDS and the still post-natal WASG joined forces and renamed to “The Left”, they clearly targeted at the west german parliaments: with 5%+ of the popular vote, you grab seats there
The voting in Hesse set up a new scenario for the SPD: before the election, they strictly denied the possibility of a coalition with the Leftists. After the vote turned out to be not very helping in setting up a ruling coalition, the party faced a public and internal discussion on how to deal with the Leftists. In eastern states, coalitions of both parties are nothing special. But the western states always were kind of taboo.
After some discussion, the leader of the Hesse SPD Andrea Ypsilanti and the chairman of the federal party Kurt Beck agreed to some strange appearing model: the “Linke” should not be included in a coalition. But tolerating an SPD-led government built on a coalition with the Green party.
But despite all power games on highter party levels, some elected member of the parliament of Hesse is not willing to follow the party leaders choice, as turned out in the last days. Now Andrea Ypsilanti will not try to become elected in the beginning of April, the federal chairman of the SPD Kurt Beck is facing loads of criticism (he is said to have influenced the Hamburg elections in a very unprofessional way when announcing the then-expected Hesse deal).
So the oldest german party is in very troubled times now, behaving like a pile of chicken when facing a fox. Probably Kurt Beck will have to go, the foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is one of the speculated successors. But what’s already obvious now: bringing the SPD back on the right (or maybe left or centrist) track won’t be easy. And the former mighty working class partys influence will further decline.