Germany’s SPD in turmoil as it plots its future

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bid to lure the centre-left Social Democrats into a new grand coalition government has plunged the SPD into turmoil that ultimately could imperil the 150-year-old party’s future. Large sections of the SPD’s leadership are opposed to forging a coalition with the conservative Merkel, after Sunday’s election failed to produce the political comeback the party had hoped for.

The SPD is still struggling to plot a new political course, eight years after the last SPD-led coalition ended amid deep divisions created by the tough economic reform agenda adopted by then chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s government. The party “is treading on thin ice,” said Axel Schaefer, an SPD parliamentary leader in North Rhine Westphalia, which is Germany’s biggest state and includes the party’s historic heartland.

Merkel sees building a new grand coalition with the SPD – along the lines of the government she headed between 2005 and 2009 – as a means of providing her with a solid parliamentary majority. But the stakes are high for the SPD this time around. “The SPD has learnt that being subservient is not necessarily to their advantage,” said Heribert Dieter, an economist with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

Merkel has already indicated that she will blame the SPD if talks to form a grand coalition fail. During the election campaign she chided the SPD’s candidate for chancellor, Peer Steinbrueck, in their televised debate for appearing to put party interests ahead of forming a grand coalition. “What matters first and foremost is the nation,” she told him. The SPD entered the campaign for the election determined to stage a rebound after its share of the vote sank to an all-time low of 23 per cent in the 2009 election.

“The SPD must become more of a social movement again,” SPD chief Sigmar Gabriel told celebrations in May to mark the party’s 150th anniversary. In the end, the SPD’s share of the vote crept up last weekend to 25.7 per cent, after a modest swing that fell far short of the party’s expectations. In the meantime, Merkel’s attempt to open talks with the SPD has served to once again expose the ruptures in the party over its future direction, while underlining the power struggle in its leadership.

Gabriel wants to hold a plebiscite to test the party membership’s support for teaming up with Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) but only after a deal with the CDU has been hammered out. Other SPD leaders, though, including Hannelore Kraft, the premier of North Rhine Westphalia and one of Germany’s most popular politicians, have already come out against a grand coalition.

Often mentioned as a future SPD chancellor candidate, Kraft had hoped to use the upper house of parliament, which represents the nation’s 16 states and which is controlled by the SPD and the Greens, as a platform to counter Merkel’s political agenda. They believe the SPD should return to opposition, to give it a chance to rethink its political brand and try to reconnect with its traditional voters.

The party’s powerful left-wing argues that the SPD should be talking with the hard-left Linke party about an alliance, rather than Merkel’s conservatives, pointing to the success of so-called red-red governments at the state level. The SPD’s crisis of identity comes at a time when other left-leaning parties across Europe are battling to balance their traditional focus on social issues with the changing economic demands unleashed by globalisation and greater European integration.

This also comes in the wake of the demise in Germany of the SPD’s traditional allies in the trade union movement, which before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a major force in the nation’s political life. Since then, the Linke party has also emerged as a major rival for the SPD, in particular in the eastern part of Germany. It snared 8.6 per cent of the national vote on Sunday.

Based on former East Germany’s old communist party, the Linke now also includes in its ranks a large number of disgruntled SPD supporters, who were angered by Schroeder’s reform agenda. But it was the scale of Merkel’s victory last Sunday, where she came within a handful of seats of governing in her own right with 41.7 per cent of the vote, that seemed to have sent shock waves throughout the SPD.

More than anything else, Merkel’s success has also demonstrated the threat posed to the SPD by the demise of strict political ideologies, with the chancellor simply co-opting some of the policies of her political opponents. In the case of the SPD, this involved Merkel reshaping their flagship policy of setting a minimum wage, and shoring up Germany’s welfare state.