Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) hasn’t had it easy these last few years. After governing the country under Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005 and passing a number of deeply unpopular neoliberal reforms, the party has seen its electoral fortunes decline precipitously ever since. Unable to muster a governing majority in 2005, the SPD was forced to become junior partner to the Christian Democrats (CDU) led by Angela Merkel — a position of weakness in which this historic mass party has remained stuck for ten of the last fourteen years.

The results have been catastrophic for the SPD. Marginalized by Merkel’s centrist maneuvering, the Social Democrats has grown increasingly indistinguishable from their conservative counterparts and increasingly unable to make a compelling case for why voting for them will make any difference in people’s lives. Voters have thus drifted away, first to Die Linke on the Left, then to the Greens in the center, and most recently to the Alternative für Deutschand (AfD) on the far right. Even greater numbers of former SPD supporters have simply stopped going to the polls altogether.

It’s no surprise, then, that recent elections have seen the party continually registering its lowest ever result, in marked contrast to the rise of the Greens and the AfD. Indeed, in the most recent European elections in May, the SPD crashed to just 15 percent support, compelling chairwoman Andrea Nahles to resign in humiliation. Such a defeat inevitably raised fundamental questions about the Social Democrats’ ability to survive in the twenty-first century.