The Imminent End of the SPD Is Nothing To Deplore

Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) have been living off illusions for decades. But reality—in the form of voters’ anger—can no longer be denied. Even sheltering behind the protective cordon sanitaire, the SPD cannot govern against the will of the people forever. After yet another series of devastating election results, the party’s irreversible decline is there for all to see.

It is the SPD’s role as kingmaker that has kept it in power uninterruptedly since 2013. Though it lost nearly 10% of the vote in the last general election in 2025—with most voters clearly demanding an end to its rule—it still governs as a junior partner in a hapless coalition. Designed to keep the right-populist AfD out of government, this arrangement allows the SPD to wield power and shape the country’s politics despite its shrinking mandate.

But voters will not be shut out forever, as several local elections in March have shown.

Within less than two weeks, the SPD lost the mayoral seat in Munich; the position of minister-president in one of its last strongholds, Rhineland-Palatinate—after 35 years; and, perhaps most shockingly, barely cleared the 5% threshold in Baden-Württemberg, haemorrhaging support above all in the state’s industrial heartlands. Worse is to come in autumn, when three further important state elections loom and the SPD is trailing badly in all polls—in Sachsen-Anhalt, it is polling at just 8%.

“The SPD is completely lost and the people know it,” said Ulrich Reitz of Focus magazine. Its final demise need not be mourned—even if it means the end of a party that has shaped German post-war politics more than almost any other.

In name, the SPD is Germany’s oldest party and the world’s first social democratic party. It was born in the mid-19th century to represent working people’s interests. In reality, it turned away from the working class decades ago. Today, it is the party of public servants and student activists—a political refuge for a small elite with no connection to traditional politics and little but contempt for the masses it once claimed to represent.

Nothing exposes this contempt more plainly than the SPD’s reaction to the AfD’s gains among working people. In both Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, the AfD took nearly 39% of the workers’ vote—almost twice its share of the overall electorate. The response from SPD circles was predictable incomprehension. “The AfD successfully exploits the cliché that mainstream politicians are out of touch,” explained one widely quoted expert. “It tells people: those at the top have no idea about the reality of your lives … And, evidently, it gets away with it.”

That, however, is no cliché—and what these commentators fail to grasp is that the AfD has already achieved something substantial, even without ever entering government: it has forced the issues that ordinary people care about onto the political agenda, and in doing so, accelerated the decline of a party that had grown comfortable ignoring them.

More perceptive observers have rightly noted that no party has betrayed its traditional voter base as thoroughly as the SPD. Many point to its pro-migration and multiculturalist stance as the primary cause. Had it followed the path of its Danish counterpart, they argue, it could have won back its voters and halted the rise of the AfD—though this claim looks shakier in light of the Danish Social Democrats’ own recent heavy losses.

But even this diagnosis may be too narrow. It is true that leading SPD functionaries have consistently campaigned against tighter asylum laws, deportations and cuts to welfare for rejected refugees—despite knowing these to be minority positions. Yet these positions are not aberrations; they are the natural expression of what the party has become. A party whose internal culture selects for precisely this type of functionary cannot simply be argued into changing course. Expecting it to come to its senses and listen to the very people its leadership feels so superior towards is like asking someone to change their character.

There is no fashionable elite cause the SPD has not eagerly championed: gendered language, trans rights, Net Zero, the phase-out of nuclear power (a technology it once enthusiastically backed in the 1960s and 70s), the abolition of the combustion engine—a point not lost on workers in Baden-Württemberg’s car industry. It has become the party of a modern-day clerisy, one that would recoil in horror even from figures within its own ranks who once managed to speak to a broader electorate.

Consider what today’s SPD supporters would make of someone like the late Holger Börner—a former concrete worker who became minister-president of Hesse in 1976. Confronted with militant middle-class Green protesters blockading a new runway at Frankfurt Airport, he famously declared, “I regret that my high office prevents me from smacking those blokes in the face myself. Back in the day on a building site, we used to sort things like that out with a roof batten.” There were always tensions in the SPD’s claim to speak for the common man. But at least the party once shared a vision of growth and did not treat its voters as subjects to be nudged, re-educated and behaviourally modified.

Unable to understand its voters, let alone provide a political perspective, SPD functionaries believed they could win points by emphasizing how much they cared: healthy eating for poor families and a sugar tax became the demands peddled by some. Others reached for the chequebook. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hollow promise of “you’ll never walk alone,” made in the summer of 2022 as energy costs soared, typified the approach. Announcing a third relief package of €65 billion, he declared he did not expect civil unrest—as though money alone could paper over the widening gulf between the party and the public. 

When voter discontent had grown so acute that even Scholz could no longer ignore it, his response was even more odd. He stubbornly promised an economic miracle: “Thanks to substantial investment in climate protection, Germany will achieve growth rates not seen since the 1950s and 60s,” he announced in spring 2023—a statement that left most sensible observers wondering whether he had lost touch not only with voters, but with reality itself. Less than a year later, his government had collapsed.

The SPD’s continued survival is, ultimately, the story of how our new oligarchies perpetuate themselves. The party that was once—for better or worse—seen as a vehicle for popular representation has become an obstacle to democratic change.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the SPD’s role in attempts to suppress the AfD. It has been among the loudest advocates for banning the right-populist party. Its branch in Rhineland-Palatinate—where it has now lost the election—was particularly aggressive: in July 2025, Interior Minister Michael Ebling (SPD) proposed and partially implemented a vetting process targeting AfD members in state employment. In the same state, an AfD candidate for mayor in the industrial city of Ludwigshafen was excluded from the race at the last minute.

If it has become nearly impossible for German voters to remove the SPD from power, that is precisely because of the mainstream parties’ collective pledge to uphold the cordon sanitaire against the AfD. Despite massive losses, the SPD will most likely continue to govern Rhineland-Palatinate—as a junior coalition partner of the CDU.

But limping on in the shadow of the AfD is not a long-term strategy. The SPD’s demise is unstoppable. The question that remains is whether anything will rise in its place—a party that actually speaks for the working people of Germany.