SPD Schleswig-Holstein via Flickr
The Crisis of Social Democracy
Ian Hoerr
Georgetown University
Ian Hoerr is a master’s student in European studies at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he concentrated on security policy. He studied abroad in Vienna, Austria, where he immersed himself in the history and politics of Central Europe.
His professional experience includes work with the Atlantic Council Europe Center, the Center for European Policy Analysis, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, and the U.S. Senate.
In 2025, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) experienced its worst electoral result since 1887, garnering a meager 16.4 percent of the vote and falling below the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD). In another first, the AfD enjoyed a substantial lead over the SPD among workers, union members, and the unemployed.
The SPD’s support has slid to 13 percent since becoming the junior partner in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s unpopular grand coalition. This is a startling appraisal for Germany’s oldest party, situating it neck-and-neck with the Left Party and behind the Greens. The AfD would be poised for first place if a federal election were held today, with the conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) securing a distant second.
The SPD’s forfeiture of issue ownership over social policies it once championed has led to significant electoral decline for the party, opening the door to insurgent challengers beyond the political center. Years of grand coalition rule have also blurred distinctions between the SPD and the CDU/CSU. Framing austerity and welfare retrenchment as unavoidable technical necessities rather than political decisions has pushed disaffected voters toward challengers offering distinctly different solutions. Prior CDU/CSU-SPD coalitions once enjoyed overwhelming supermajorities ranging from as many as 90.1 percent of the voting seats in the Bundestag to as few as 72.9 percent. The floor has dropped significantly during the last decade, with Merkel’s 2017 grand coalition comprising 56.2 percent. Merz’s even slimmer 52.1 percent majority reveals the extent to which the electorate no longer feels represented by the parties that once dominated postwar politics.
Worker protections, pensions, and unemployment benefits have defined the SPD since its inception. Otto von Bismarck established the world’s first universal old-age pension in 1889 in an unsuccessful attempt to outflank the party’s appeal to the working class. Through persistent advocacy, the SPD became the political voice through which German workers translated collective demands into electoral power. After supporters propelled the SPD to win the most seats in the Reichstag in 1912, Social Democrats provided the groundswell to lower the retirement age from 70 to 65 in 1916. This remained standard until the autumn of 1972, when Chancellor Willy Brandt’s government made it possible for workers with thirty-five years of contribution to retire with benefits at 63. Brandt also established stronger protections for workers during illness and higher unemployment benefits. These years marked the heyday of Germany’s welfare state and the SPD’s best election result in history with 45.8 percent of the vote in 1972.
The heights of the Brandt era grew steadily distant, beginning in 2003 with a controversial reform package that forced painful trade-offs onto the SPD’s traditional base. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Germany faced persistently high unemployment. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s SPD-Green coalition responded with Agenda 2010, weakening labor and unemployment protections to spur higher employment. The new unemployment system, Hartz IV, tied income support to sanctions for failure to prove job search efforts and loosened rules for hiring and firing. The reform also replaced the previous earnings-linked policy with a fixed benefit, offering those who lost high-paying jobs in skilled trades the same amount of assistance as less skilled recipients, disproportionately affecting the SPD’s unionized base. These painful tradeoffs prompted trade unions to organize protests against Agenda 2010, publicly exposing the rift between the SPD’s brand as a protector of the working class and the new reality.
This loss of credibility among blue-collar workers and the unemployed cost the SPD its heartland in May 2005, when the SPD suffered its worst electoral showing in North Rhine-Westphalia since 1954. In the ensuing snap federal election, the SPD narrowly lost to the CDU/CSU. Seven years earlier, Schröder’s SPD had triumphed with 40.9 percent of the vote; he left the chancellorship with the SPD at 34.2 percent. Boosted by an influx of former SPD voters, the near-term beneficiary was the newly formed left-wing alliance that later merged into the Left Party, to which many disillusioned Social Democrats defected in the following years.[1]
Neither opposition nor government reversed the erosion of the party’s base. Chancellor Angela Merkel preserved Agenda 2010, preventing Social Democrats from disowning the reforms as junior partner to the Union. The SPD was held accountable in 2009, when the party was thrust into opposition after its vote share tumbled to 23 percent.[2] The party’s 2013 campaign to roll back aspects of Agenda 2010 yielded a marginal recovery but insufficient leverage to deliver the promised policy change in the grand coalition that followed, revealing the widening gap between the SPD’s promises and its ability to fulfill them. By 2017, a high proportion of workers, union members, and the unemployed defected to the AfD; the SPD’s support dwindled to 20.5 percent. Chairman Sigmar Gabriel attributed the loss to his party’s failure “to implement the achievements of modernity—social security, participation, solidarity—sustainably and tangibly in everyday life.”
Revitalizing the party base today requires evolving alongside the needs of the workers, pensioners, and young voters whose support Social Democrats can no longer take for granted.
The most concrete attempt at redressing the legacy of Hartz IV was made by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s traffic light coalition in 2023. “Citizen’s money” (Bürgergeld) modestly increased benefits for the unemployed and chronically ill. Championing his reform, Scholz asserted that a strong welfare state would ensure stability and socioeconomic cohesion “in difficult times.” Yet, Bürgergeld alone could not inspire confidence amidst a recession and soaring energy costs wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. An electorate overwhelmingly skeptical of SPD economic competency dealt Social Democrats their historic loss in 2025.
While the current coalition is the only stable configuration to uphold the anti-AfD firewall, compromises to advance Chancellor Merz’s domestic priorities are out of step with the broader electorate and the SPD’s base. The replacement of Bürgergeld with “basic security” (Grundsicherung) imposes higher sanctions than Hartz IV, including suspension of all benefits for missing consecutive appointments or turning down job offers. Despite the SPD’s near-unanimous support for Grundsicherung in the Bundestag, the CDU/CSU was eager to skewer Scholz’s legacy accomplishment, jubilantly declaring: “BÜRGERGELD IS HISTORY!”
Furthermore, SPD leadership endorsed a proposal to tie the statutory retirement age to life expectancy, which would prevent Germans from retiring early with full benefits and gradually raise the retirement age to 70. This is deeply unpopular among most Germans. The SPD’s own youth wing opposes the proposal, highlighting acute dissatisfaction within the party. While the qualifying age has gradually risen to 64, the early retirement option remains a landmark achievement that has meaningfully improved the lives of ordinary workers. Doing away with the option would be a failure of government to guarantee standards of living enjoyed by prior generations for over half a century and would ripen the appeal of parties that have not been saddled with governing over welfare retrenchment.
This year’s state elections may well act as a barometer for public support, as North Rhine-Westphalia was in 2005. In March, the SPD lost the state premiership in Rhineland-Palatinate for the first time in thirty-five years. September’s election in Saxony-Anhalt yielded the first far-right landslide in postwar German history while Social Democrats delivered an uncompetitive turnout and the Union suffered its worst result in the state since German reunification. The Saxony-Anhalt AfD built on the party’s inroads with blue-collar voters by coupling welfare-chauvinism with sharp criticism of Germany’s establishment consensus. Parliamentary group leader Ulrich Siegmund campaigned on eliminating benefits for migrants and reallocating those funds in the state’s budget. Just ahead of the campaign season, Siegmund lamented in the Landtag that “uninvited guests” receive the same support as citizens who have paid into the pension fund for decades. While voters can evidently trace the dots between the scarcity they feel and the governing records of Germany’s traditional parties, the AfD channels frustrations toward migrants to avoid confronting more complex policy discussions.
However, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the SPD overperformed polls and earned second place within 3 percent of the AfD. Snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat, the nine-year incumbent Minister-President Manuela Schwesig is expected to form a coalition with the Left and the Greens. Schwesig was vocal on the campaign trail about preserving Brandt’s hard-fought early retirement option, asserting that those who have spent their lives paying into the pension fund should not “bear the main burden” of Merz’s proposed overhaul. In contrast to the SPD, the CDU failed to surpass the 5 percent threshold, marking the first time in history that the party has not qualified for Landtag representation.
These elections have jolted SPD leadership into reflecting on the reform agenda with renewed scrutiny. SPD General Secretary Tim Klüssendorf framed the elections as an indicator that the federal coalition “can’t simply bulldoze ahead and carry on as before.” The German Trade Union Confederation seeks to raise the pressure by organizing demonstrations to send “a clear message in support of a strong welfare state.” While increased skepticism of the reform agenda may have lent the party a fighting chance in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, criticism alone will not deliver a broader recovery. Dismal performances in this year’s other state elections in Baden-Württemberg and Berlin underscore years of accumulated distrust among many voters.
Many remember Willy Brandt’s call to “dare more democracy” from the political system at the culmination of a decade of cultural change. Revitalizing the party base today requires earnest engagement with Germany’s skeptical electorate and evolving alongside the needs of the workers, pensioners, and young voters whose support Social Democrats can no longer take for granted.
[1] Andreas M. Wüst, “Yet Another Grand Coalition: The Social Democrats at the Crossroads,” German Politics & Society 36, no. 2 (2018): 87–99, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48561487, p. 93.
[2] Jonathan Olsen, “Past Imperfect, Future Tense: The SPD before and after the 2013 Federal Election,” in The Merkel Republic: An Appraisal, ed. Eric Langenbacher (Berghahn Books, 2015), 61–72, p. 61.
