Can Germany’s Social Democrats make a  comeback?

While attention in Europe focuses on Friedrich Merz, the next German Chancellor — a 69 year old Catholic banker, who likes to pilot his own jet around German cities — the Social Democratic Party also has to choose a new leader. He or she will hope to put the party back on its feet after suffering its lowest-ever postwar vote.

The far-right AfD party, commonly referred to in ordinary discourse in Germany as Nazis, beat the democratic left SPD into third place. That allowed media headlines about a political earthquake. Germany has broken the triple taboo that has ruled over its politics since the first post-war election in 1949. These are a rigorous opposition to extreme nationalist politics; keeping communists shunned as a political movement with electoral presence as in France or Italy, or leadership positions in trade unions as in Britain, Italy, Spain and France; and finally a clear Atlanticist orientation via NATO, and a rejection of Gaullist ideas of an autonomous existence and identity for Europe based on reflex opposition to the United States.

Between 1950 and 2000 Germany’s  two big political formations, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) got 90 per cent of the votes between them. As late as 2005 the CDU-SPD duopoly won 70 per cent of votes, in contrast to other European parties where the 21^st century saw the arrival of many more parties redrawing the political landscape.

Now the SPD is down to a miserable 16 per cent. Merz’s repeated statement that Germany needs “to achieve independence from the US” as a result of Trump’s policies and statements since he took over the White House are without precedent in post-war German history. This puts Merz much closer to the neo-Gaullism of Emmanuel Macron than Sir Keir Starmer, who still hopes Washington will return to its former Atlanticist stance from 1950-2025.

The SPD is supporting Merz and expects to be rewarded with major ministries when the Coalition agreement is finally hammered out. What matters more is the SPD party congress in June when  a new leader will be chosen to replace Olaf Scholz. The SPD has barely four years to re-emerge from the doldrums of its low vote in the 2025 election. Jockeying has begun to lead the party.

The SPD are in the same position as the British Conservatives – a party of power reduced to the smallest number of seats in their history. Just as British Tories are challenged by Reform on the Right, the German Social Democrats face a heterogenous coalition of parties – the Greens, Die Linke (the Left), and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). The latter movement failed, like the liberal Free Democrats, to get over the 5 per cent vote share necessary to enter the Bundestag. But they remain in contention with the SPD, along with the nationalist AfD, for the left-behind working class vote, especially in East Germany.

The SPD looks nervously west across the Rhine or south of the Alps and sees the once commanding Left parties of postwar democratic socialism further away from power than ever.

The SPD has extracted major concessions from Merz in the new coalition contract – the formal programme of government under the new CDU-SPD coalition. The minimum wage will rise to 20 Euros, a third higher than in the UK. The partial abolition of the Debt Brake, a sort of updated version of the Gold Standard, which destroyed both Conservative and Labour governments in Britain in the 1920s, means that a massive dose of Keynesian deficit spending can now be unleashed to rebuild German infrastructure, modernise the armed forces, and help promote regional growth. Some 41 billion Euros a year earmarked for green net zero(ish) investments.

So in addition to being a loyal partner to Merz, who has already declared his opposition to Trumponomics, the SPD has to decide how to reinvent itself. It must move back to becoming again a serious contender for power, as Labour achieved after the failure of the Miliband-Corbyn years.

A possible SPD leader is the current Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, who is set to become one of the SPD’s key politicians in the next government. A burly man of 65 who compared Putin to Hitler, he has consistently argued that Germany needed to rearm to face down the menace from Putin and to accept more borrowing to rebuild the German economy. He can feel vindicated today.

His career was spent close to Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair’s partner, when the two men headed government in Britain and Germany 25 years ago. Pistorius even took as his girlfriend Schröder’s fourth wife, Doris, for a few years.

A younger rising star of the SPD is Lars Klingbeil, 47, also a Schröder protégé. He followed Schröder as chair of the Jusos (Young Socialists), a traditional launchpad for a stellar SPD career and was co-leader of the SPD under Olaf Scholz as Chancellor. He is in the “Seiheim Circle”, usually described as a Blairite grouping. He is a strong supporter of Israel in the long tradition of the SPD.

Could the SPD chose its first woman leader in Anke Rehlinger, 48, currently the head of the Saarland regional government bordering France? She likes to throw weights around and was a champion shot-putter and discus thrower as a young woman. She has risen steadily through the ranks of the SPD without so far tripping over.

All three possible future SPD leaders are competent, risk-avoiding centrists, leaning right rather than left, not unlike the current Labour government in Britain.

The Angela Merkel coalition government with its crawling to Putin, its dependence on Russian oil and gas, its conservative fiscal policy, its failure to renew hope in the ex-communist DDR economy or society, its open door to 2 million Syrian immigrants, has left a dreadful legacy to Europe. But the SPD was in coalition with Mrs Merkel for most of her 16 years, latterly with Scholz as her deputy.

She in effect exiled Friedrich Merz from German politics for a decade. Now he is in charge. But if his policy mix does not deliver, the SPD coukd come back as a party with new answers for the problems Europe’s  biggest economy and population now face.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Minister of Europe who has worked in Germany with trade unions and the Social Democratic Party.

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