Saving Germany's Social Democrats
An interview with the historian Christina Morina
“We are creating modern Germany,” proclaimed the Social Democrats in the 1960s. Today, most people aren’t so sure this is true anymore.
In Germany’s 2017 federal elections, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffered its worst results since before WWII, winning only 20.5% of the vote. Instead of going into opposition as it had promised to do if it lost, it re-entered a coalition government — a so-called Grand Coalition, or GroKo — with the Christian Democrat-Christian Social “union” parties (CDU/CSU) led by Angela Merkel. (You can read my report about this episode for The Nation here.)
The coalition didn’t turn out to be very grand for the SPD. The party suffered midterm election losses at the state level, came in third place (behind the CDU/CSU and the Greens) in the May 26 elections to the European Parliament, and was only in fourth place — behind the Greens, the CDU/CSU, and even the far-right AfD — in two national tracking polls released June 15.
After the poor showing in the European elections and, on the same day, a serious loss in the city-state of Bremen, where the SPD had been in charge for seventy-three years, party leader Andrea Nahles was forced to step down. The party is now being run by a troika of temporary leaders.
With another round of difficult state elections coming up later this year, the sense of crisis around the party has deepened.
I spoke with Christina Morina about the party and its problems. Morina is a German historian whose research deals with the history of social democracy. In August 2018, her open letter protesting the SPD’s decision to shut down the party’s Historians’ Commission, which had been set up by Willy Brandt, attracted more than 1,100 signatories in Germany’s academic community. The heading of the letter read “No Future without History.”
Morina is the author of Die Erfindung des Marxismus: Wie eine Idee die Welt eroberte (The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Conquered the World) and is also a co-author of a recent book analyzing the history of, and arguing against, the resurgence of nationalism in Germany: Zur rechten Zeit: Wider die Rückkehr des Nationalismus.
In English, Morina has published Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
This interview has been translated from German and edited for length and clarity.
Q. Why is the SPD so weak?
There are several reasons, one of which is that the left electorate is split between the Left Party and the SPD, and of course the Greens have won voters who used to vote SPD. The bigger problem is that the political center has co-opted much of what the SPD wants — not everything, of course, but there’s been a “social-democratization” of German politics. The effect has essentially made the SPD the victim of its own success. So many things became mainstream: for example, the legal minimum wage. And the upshot is that the SPD seems to have run out of issues.
But what I find most concerning is the lack of vision, of a sense of what a social-democratic society should actually be in the 21st century. What does it mean to participate in society in the 21st century, how do we negotiate a concept such as social justice, and guarantee it? What is the big promise of social democrats today, of a party that used to inspire up to half of the electorate as the champion of full and equal participation, education and opportunity for all and of capitalism with a human face?
There is very little visionary thinking about these things, and people feel this. Instead, one putters around here and there — on very important things, don’t get me wrong — improving access to kindergartens, education, reducing the cost of college, pensions. But these are all little building blocks, and there’s no overarching narrative (Gesamterzählung) that can compare to the old idea of participation and progress that social democracy used to offer. That idea has to be renewed or even replaced somehow because “progress” has sort of lost its place as a positive idea — at least in its 19th and early 20th century version, which ultimately will lead to the destruction of our planet. How does one come up with a new programmatic answer? So far, the Social Democrats, if I might put it harshly, seem completely clueless.
Q. How do you account for the lack of vision? Sometimes I hear that the party, or at least the party leadership, has become too alienated from intellectuals, artists, writers. That it’s become a professional political operation, nothing more.
Yes, I think that’s right. There’s less and less of the kind of friendly disposition toward the SPD among intellectuals that there always used to be. There was always that left-liberal intellectual milieu, often “old white men” like Günter Grass, that felt devoted to the SPD and joined the party and lent it in turn the special aura that it had. There were different ways then for the party leaders to engage with [these intellectuals’] ideas, if all too often in these sort of exclusive discussions around the fireplace if you will, but somehow nothing new has developed in place of this, not enough alternative channels have been cultivated in more recent times, it seems.
For example, I wrote the open letter last year against shutting down the SPD’s historians’ commission. We had over a thousand historians and colleagues from other disciplines sign this letter. By no means were they all SPD members. It took a very long time before we got any kind of reaction at all, and then the party found no way to connect with these sympathizers and concerned academics or to make anything out of their ideas and their interest. This is certainly due to structural reasons in the party and the way it communicates, that it has no way to interact with this kind of initiative, and what I hear from party members in general is constant complaint that there is no lively democratic discourse from the bottom up.
Q. But there is more democracy in the SPD than in the CDU, right, with the SPD’s use of membership-wide votes on important matters, for example? Also, I think this gets to the question of how one can organize a political party today. I know that some local SPD groups have experimented with allowing non-members to participate in meetings, trying to cater to today’s more ad hoc style of engagement. But if more democracy inside the party is a good thing, at what point does this move too close to populist formations like 5 Stars in Italy, something that isn’t really a political party? Doesn’t representative democracy require some hierarchy?
Those are, of course, very big questions. First of all, it would be a good thing if there were at least a few semi-formal arenas where one could just start talking about ideas, but the SPD doesn’t have such arenas. At least seen from the outside, there’s no place where this discussion happens. There is the Commission on Basic Values, the website of which is pretty sad. And then there was at the end of last year the “Debate Camp,” little more than a sort of weekend party where you could discuss things a little. But programmatic renewal, especially not with an eye on a wider social participation, cannot be achieved if you reduce that process to PR-stunts or closed discussions (Vorstandsklausur) among the party leadership.
But as you said, in representative democracy, yes, I agree you have to have a party structure and firm regulatory rules to forge compromise and balance interests, I don’t think what we need are “movements.” Rather we need well-moderated, structured “mini-publics,” which are connected to the party, which speak to and cultivate new groups of voters, and can connect voters to the party in new ways. Of course, it’s all going to be less permanent than it was before. I always come back to the Greens on this, whom I’ve also advised. They find ways, new forums where they invite people, ask and respond to questions and learn, but [these events] are really well prepared, and some of the input actually ends up in position papers.
So with the Greens there’s a mixture of openness toward the public and at the same time work “behind closed doors,” where something politically substantial can be created. There’s nothing populist about it, nor is it elitist. And in fact, besides the AfD, the only party that is gaining members in eastern Germany, where things are very bad, is the Green Party. So they are accomplishing something. Which is all the more remarkable because people are much more reluctant in eastern Germany to join parties!
Q. We talked about the intellectual climate in the SPD, but what about the intellectual climate more generally? It seems to me these past few years that in Germany all the intellectual energy is coming from the right.
That’s of course an interesting position. You can look at it qualitatively or quantitatively. You can count how many newspapers or bloggers are on the left, and there, as ever, most of them are on the left. But when you look at it qualitatively, and ask what are the more innovative forms [of political-intellectual life] — such as these “salons” that are being organized by the right, or a publishing venture like Antaios in Schnellroda headed by [far-right publicist] Götz Kubitschek, and a culture of discussion that has developed, events at local bookstores, like the one in Dresden, for right-leaning citizens. And they’re reaching new people and doing it in new ways.
They have new magazines, very stylish, illustrated with cartoons about Carl Schmitt and the like, not badly done at all, in fact very well packaged, in [the right-wing magazine] Cato. I had to do a double take. I found myself in the Weimar train station flipping through the new Cato, and on the second page there’s a cartoon about Carl Schmitt. It’s pretty striking.
A lot of what they are saying [on the right] is old wine in new bottles — the “great replacement,” “over-foreignization”, “the boat is full.” In our book Zur rechten Zeit, we demonstrate that these ideas were always present in postwar Germany; much of it isn’t new at all, but they are using new and effective techniques to strive for cultural hegemony.
There’s actually a sort of eco-fascist milieu that is developing, this idea of being connected both to a homeland and to nature and at the same time infused with ethno-nationalist ideas. Qualitatively something new has been created, and therefore there might be something to your impression that in the last years more is happening on the right than on the left.
The real embarrassment is that the left’s answer was this sideshow around “Aufstehen,” [the now-failed web-based initiative by Left Party leader Sahra Wagenknecht]. No foundation, no substance. A populist will-o’-the-wisp, as I and many others suspected from the beginning. What the left needs is to work towards reuniting and bridging these age-old frictions [among left factions], not take the limited votes it has now and divide them up further.
Q. We see the same thing in France, where the Parti Socialiste (PS) is no longer a force, and the division on the left led to disappointing results in the European elections — 6% for France Unbowed, for example, even less for the PS. How much worse could it get for the SPD?
At least temporarily it could get worse. In the Netherlands, the Social Democrats were down to around 8%, but then suddenly again in first place in the EU election. So it’s very volatile. But the monumental structure of the SPD, this 156-year-old party, can’t simply be swept away from one day to the next. That much is clear, and also no one would want it gone anyway.
I think the way the SPD has positioned itself vis-a-vis Macron [who was minister in a Socialist government but elected president as leader of a purpose-built centrist party], namely, by saying, “We won’t have anything to do with him,” was a mistake. He tried to reach out to the SPD and test the waters for an alliance, and in response [then-SPD leader] Andrea Nahles merely rejected him as a competitor. I think that was wrong.
It’s another example of how we need new thinking. But in answer to your question, Can things get even worse for the SPD: yes, and if they continue to behave like they have the past few weeks [since their poor showing in the EU elections], staying in the grand coalition [with Merkel’s Christian Democrats], it will be very damaging, and they will continue to lose supporters until they are willing to accept that they must leave the government, go into the political wilderness for a while and start over from the ground up.
Q. If you were a political consultant, what would you tell them is the best moment to leave the coalition government?
Yesterday. Or the day before.
Q. OK. So from the very beginning, no GroKo?
Obviously, I can understand the argument that it was a kind of emergency situation [because coalition talks between the CDU/CSU, FDP, and Greens had failed, and there was no other way to form a government], and so the party felt it had to demonstrate statesmanship and accept this responsibility.
But if you want to rescue the idea of social democracy, then at some point you’ve got to think about the party’s existence. So I think it was a major error to go into this latest coalition at all. And I believe now to simply drag things out over the summer and then leave [the government] in the fall is not a credible plan.
Instead, they should say, “We understand that the public no longer wants us in government and we’re going to start over.” Then there would be new elections, and the SPD would probably lose even more support. But this position would have credibility, or at least offer a vantage point from which to start regaining credibility.
Of course, there’s a pile of money, offices, and jobs at stake, I get that. However, at this point the issue is really saving the bigger idea of social democracy and not just the Social Democratic Party as it is now.
Q. What kind of vision do you think the SPD needs? What do you put on the bumper sticker?
Yes, we need a language that is campaign-ready. I’ve worked on Marx for many years and on the invention of Marxism, and Marx is so interesting because he was able to penetrate through, with the power of his thought and his language, by convincing people that he understood the essence of what was really going on —- it’s his claim that he has figured out how capitalism works and his ability to vividly explain it with concepts like “class war” and “the reserve army” and the idea of “immiseration.” His ideas and texts gained so much traction because he used a political language that promised insight and control in a rapidly changing world, it was so attractive not so much because it pointed to a utopia but because it gave people the feeling that they can understand what was happening to them in the present and suggested ways of how to deal with it.
This capacity to convince people that you understand the complexity of the present, not in its radical version of course where you claim to own the truth but to understand reality and thus being able to offer plausible solutions, is an important tool in the political arena. But I have the feeling that the SPD itself no longer believes that it has this capacity. And that’s the first step, to be able to show: We understand what’s happening.
When [SPD Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Hubertus] Heil proposes to react to the changing labor conditions and work-relations by enabling more people to take sabbaticals, this is a sign that he does not know what the world is like. Instead, I think we have to move back to the original ideas of the Social Democrats, namely, how to achieve maximum participation in political, economic, social and cultural terms, and not only of German citizens, but what forms of participation there are for people who live here only temporarily. Our educational system is still one of the most socially unjust in Europe, in few other countries what your parents do matters as much for your prospects as in Germany.
Now, how to fit all that on the bumper sticker, that's the million dollar question, but I think there’s a way.
Instead, the SPD has focused much of its program on managing poverty and cushioning the working poor, which is of course essential, but the party has concentrated too much and exclusively on this idea that “we have to take care of the weakest in society.” Meanwhile, the broad middle class who have decent jobs and some standing in life do not feel that they’re addressed by the party’s focus on welfare — which is necessary, but there needs to be an awful lot more than that.
And here I would like to cite the great Jürgen Kocka, one of my historian colleagues, that “every society has the kind of capitalism it deserves.” The SPD doesn’t get this anymore, doesn’t own it, doesn’t strive for it: that we decide what we want the economy to be like. That’s the kind of topic [chief of the party’s youth wing] Kevin Kühnert was trying to raise, however clumsily, [when he suggested before the European elections that nationalization of large companies might be a good idea] but that’s the kind of level of thinking necessary today, realistic, pragmatic, and visionary at the same time. Many people think the Greens, at this point, are best at this: We shape the economy, not vice versa. The SPD has to get out of this government and go back to the idea that capitalism – and our “social-market democracy” – is what we choose to make it.