The Last Battle of European Social Democracy

On September 14th, 14 million eligible voters in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest state, will head to the polls to elect their local governments. Also, there lies the Ruhr region, once the industrial engine of the nation and the traditional stronghold of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Yet after decades of structural decline and political neglect, the Social Democrats appear to have forfeited their long-standing claim to power. Nationwide, the AfD has already overtaken them as the leading party among workers and now seeks to breach even the last red bastions. What unfolds here is a magnified image of a European malaise: social democracy faces nothing less than an existential crisis.

The SPD has been harder hit than any other political family by deindustrialisation. But the problem runs deeper. The party has drifted so far from the lived experience of working people that electoral defeats scarcely elicit a response anymore. In this, German social democracy is simply retracing the path of its sister parties across Europe.

The Heartland hollowed out

Nowhere was the SPD more firmly rooted than in the Ruhr. For decades, its towns and districts were governed almost exclusively by Social Democrats; its constituencies were regarded as impregnable. But the region never recovered from the collapse of coal and steel.

Gelsenkirchen still tops the unemployment charts, with 15.3% out of work compared to a national average of 6.2%. In Duisburg and Dortmund, around one in three children grows up in welfare-dependent households. The entire Ruhr is threaded with tram and subway lines that were once meant to form an integrated network—until the money ran out, leaving only fragments. Essen and Duisburg each carry debts of more than €2 billion. The region’s per capita economic output lags about 20% behind the German average.

The political consequences are stark. Once, the SPD routinely scored over 50% in local elections here. Today it struggles to hold 25%. This is not only a story of anger at those in charge. It is also the product of demographic upheaval: the industrial working class has aged, dwindled, or moved away, replaced by a professional managerial class employed in the public sector. Initially, the SPD benefited—this group was unlikely to vote CDU. But the party’s elites soon became dominated by academics, losing touch with the idiom and instincts of workers.

Few anecdotes capture this shift more clearly than Dortmund’s mayors. From 1973 to 1999, Günter Samtlebe, himself a miner, was famous for his earthy language. He once summed up the local economy: “To mine seven million tons of coal and produce seven million tons of steel, you needed seven million hectoliters of beer.” Today’s mayor, by contrast, is a career politician with roots in radical student politics—an emblem of the SPD’s transformation. Meanwhile, the newly won academic voters soon drifted away to the Greens and the Left. The party was left stranded between two camps.

Migration and the great divide

Nowhere is this alienation more glaring than on migration. The Ruhr was once a magnet for labour migration. But as the factories closed, the character of migration changed. Cheap rents and low living costs attracted newcomers less for work than for survival, often leading to parallel societies. Overstretched local authorities struggled with welfare abuse and rising crime, often preferring inaction to accusations of racism.

Few places are as infamous as Duisburg-Marxloh, where only 20% of residents hold a German passport, and barely half of them vote. In the last federal election, the AfD captured 24.8% here, almost matching the SPD’s 25.3%. The cityscape bears the marks of ghettoisation, with visible tensions between Roma newcomers on the one side and Turkish-origin residents and Russian Germans on the other side. No surprise that the latter groups do not hesitate to cast their votes in favour of the AfD.

In Cologne, meanwhile, the so-called Fairness Agreement between all parties but the AfD sought to ban migration as a campaign issue. The CDU quickly paid the price, reprimanded for raising the subject of a refugee shelter. The message was heard nationwide: better silence than debate. Yet this approach is disastrous, handing the AfD a monopoly on an issue that voters plainly care about.

The SPD is right that people prioritise affordable housing, good schools, functioning healthcare, and safe streets. But by refusing to discuss migration honestly—out of political correctness or fear of offending the left-green orthodoxies—it undermines its credibility precisely on these concerns. Large-scale immigration requires more housing, more classrooms, more doctors, more police. If educational attainment among newcomers remains low, the school system buckles without creating new economic dynamism. If crime is disproportionately concentrated in certain groups, social cohesion erodes. Simply hiring more social workers or police is no solution—budgets are tight, and the perception of unfairness grows among hard-working citizens, including immigrants themselves, who feel they are footing the bill for those unwilling to integrate.

Here the SPD is trapped. Its leadership, steeped in academia and green-inflected politics, seems untroubled by the transformation from a workers’ party into a welfare party. Having abandoned ideological flexibility, it sees little alternative but to double down—through moralising, through attempts to police speech, and through legal campaigns to weaken or even ban the AfD. As the party continues to lose its heartlands, the desperation grows with every mandate lost.

A European pattern

Elsewhere, the trajectory is clear. In the Netherlands, Labour merged with the Greens into a ‘woke’ bloc after losing its working-class base to the right. In France, the Parti Socialiste lies in ruins, with populists of both Left and Right competing for its inheritance. Across the continent, social democracy is shrinking: in the European Council, Social Democrats now hold only three of 27 seats, already outnumbered by the Right.

The traditional strength of social democracy—the ability to unite workers with progressive elites—has evaporated. Any strategist would advise the SPD to return to its core mission. As Gerhard Schröder, an SPD legend, once quipped when Volkswagen considered vegetarian options in its canteens: “Currywurst is the power bar of the skilled worker.” Today’s SPD leadership, still ensconced at the helm, dismissed the remark with a sneer. Time will tell who has the last laugh.