Burned Out

The dreary, damp weather typical of fall days in Berlin fit the mood this October 7, when SPD cochairs Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken stepped in front of the cameras at party headquarters. They had come to announce the resignation, effective immediately, of their general secretary Kevin Kühnert. The decision to step down, the thirty-five-year-old Kühnert explained in a letter to the party faithful, had nothing to do with politics: it was the product of unspecified health issues.

Symbolically, Kühnert’s departure marked the end of a short-lived resurgence of the ostensibly “left” wing of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Following a brief Bernie Sanders–inspired boost in the late 2010s that brought Esken and Kühnert to prominence in the first place, the left wing, rather than fight for a fundamentally different approach to politics, eagerly struck a power-sharing deal with the party establishment. While a clear majority of SPD members had voted to change the party’s internal balance of power, Scholz was nonetheless soon named its candidate for chancellor.

Unsurprisingly, after he became head of government in late 2021, the SPD’s more left-wing flank struggled to distinguish itself. His government’s finances were largely dictated by the hawkish neoliberals of Lindner’s FDP, and the kinds of public investment Germany desperately needed were simply off the table. Kühnert and co found themselves defending government spending policies they had made a name for themselves by criticizing.

Kühnert’s resignation was not the only sign of exhaustion, however. It came only two weeks after the leaders of the other party in the coalition, the Greens, also threw in the towel following disastrous regional election results. Former youth leader Ricarda Lang and her colleague Omid Nouripour, also nominal leftists, had only been in office since January 2022, elected at a triumphant gathering that came just months after the party’s best-ever result in a national-level contest, in October 2021. Much like Kühnert, they embodied the younger generation of functionaries who had swept into parliament in that general election. Some 40 percent of the Greens’ MPs were under forty years old — and promised that their generation would do things differently.

Yet for all the newfound demographic diversity and soaring rhetoric, three years later the party had little to show for it. The day after their departure, the executive board of the Green Youth collectively resigned, decrying their party’s failure to “take on the rich and powerful.” They have announced that they are founding a new, independent organization.

Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number

There are, certainly, some outward similarities between the Greens’ and the SPD’s current ills. Both were led by media-savvy millennials whose whole adult lives had been spent within the party apparatus and who, faced with the realities of high office in a country where government deficits are constitutionally banned, promptly gave up or even retreated into private life. Yet the brief rise and subsequent nosedive of Germany’s milquetoast liberal vanguard is less a testament to the follies of generational politics than it is proof of how feeble the center left’s break with neoliberalism was to begin with.

Even Angela Merkel had ruled from the center for the last decade or so of her tenure and had already rounded off the sharpest edges of labor-market reforms and changes to welfare by the time Scholz took power. Though the SPD man was elected on a vaguely progressive platform, his government was by and large an extension of the last Merkel cabinet, albeit with a few tweaks. Figures like Kühnert, who went from high-school class president to the public face of the SPD’s left wing in only a decade, lacked both the political substance and the institutional clout to serve as much more than window-dressing in such a project.

Nevertheless, measured on its own terms, the traffic-light coalition initially appeared serious about some of its modest aims. Elected in part thanks to the massive youth mobilizations inspired by Greta Thunberg’s school strike, the Green-controlled climate ministry pledged a massive build-out of solar and wind power, putting Europe’s largest economy on track to reach carbon neutrality by 2045. The SPD made good on its promise to raise the minimum wage to €12 per hour and followed it up with moderate welfare increases a year later. Yet these costly projects were both financed not by raising taxes on the rich but through clever bookkeeping. The presence in government of the Free Democrats — an inevitability given the poor showing for the left-wing party Die Linke — ostensibly prevented the two larger coalition partners from scrapping the country’s established fiscal discipline. A more cynical interpretation would be that Lindner’s austerian dogmas served as a convenient foil for a tepid Chancellor Scholz, in any case intent on rocking the boat as little as possible.

Yet the proverbial boat was nevertheless rocked, and in a big way, by the Russian invasion of Ukraine just two months into the new government’s tenure. The war was particularly damaging to the SPD, who for decades had pursued a policy of “change through trade” vis-à-vis Russia. The party now found itself accused of having turned a blind eye to Russian imperialism, for which it could atone only by pledging massive amounts of weapons and aid to Ukraine. Though no one could convincingly accuse the Greens of harboring Putinite sympathies, they too, were forced to reexamine their energy policies, underpinned as they were by the unspoken assumption of readily available Russian gas.

With that supply now threatened and no cheap alternatives in sight — not to mention the €100 billion earmarked for the military in response to Russia’s attack — serious doubts emerged over the viability of the German climate strategy, if not its industrial strategy as a whole. By the end of 2022, economic growth was nearing zero, and in 2023 the country entered a full-blown recession that is set to continue into 2025.

To the Greens’ credit, they pressed ahead with a few signature climate policies in a nod to their increasingly demoralized base, but did so in a way that, detached from any otherwise ambitious program of public investment and implemented amid a mild cost-of-living crisis, alienated more people than was necessary. The government’s attempts to urge homeowners to install heat pumps, though cost-efficient in the long run, cost consumers tens of thousands to install even after government subsidies, and reinforced perceptions of an inherent link between climate protection and economic immiseration. Within a few years, and largely due to their own blunders, the SPD and Greens went from a source of modest center-left optimism to the least popular government in recent history. That its young, progressive fig leaves began jumping ship should have come as little surprise. Scholz, perhaps sensing how bad this was all starting to look for him, ultimately decided to cut his losses and go out with a bang, rather than stand by as things unraveled around him.

And Yet It Moves

Absent a miracle, Scholz’s chancellorship will end in spring of next year and go down in history as perhaps the final nail in the German center-left’s political coffin. For many German voters, “the Left,” if that is what this is, now stands for arrogant politicians, rising energy prices, war, and governmental incompetence.

That said, German centrism shouldn’t be counted out quite yet. For it may be the case that a new iteration of it is emerging. This has been enabled by the remarkably quick rise of the enigmatic former leader of Die Linke, Sahra Wagenknecht, and her eponymously named Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Following its solid double-digit performances in September’s regional elections, the party has now assumed ministerial posts in regional governments in Brandenburg and Thuringia, where Die Linke governed until recently. Just this week, Wagenknecht called for a national “government of experts” after February’s elections composed of “upright, knowledgeable and incorruptible personalities” who would, among other things, place a freeze on asylum applications and begin peace negotiations with Russia.

This new expert-led center, should it take shape, would certainly have a few different emphases (the main sticking points seem to be weapons for Ukraine and a reckoning over COVID-19 measures), but thanks to Wagenknecht’s political triangulation of recent years, could perhaps help steer the ship into calmer waters over the medium term. Her calls for tightening migration restrictions and relaxing the sanctions on Russia enjoy support well into the political center, particularly since bringing back Russian gas may be the only hope for Germany’s ailing industry. Integrating Wagenknecht would also help to neutralize yet another party of opposition, albeit at the cost of leaving the antiestablishment mantle entirely to the far right.

Wagenknecht, her progressive critics are keen to point out, is not — or at least, no longer — a socialist. But precisely because she has moved so far to the center, she exerts much more influence on politics in Germany than her former comrades have managed to. Indeed, a month before the cascade of resignations began in the center-left camp, Die Linke cochairs Martin Schirdewan and Janine Wissler held a similar press conference to announce that they would not be pursuing reelection at the upcoming party congress. The electoral losses under their watch had been too painful, the gap between expectations and reality too great. Now, with elections less than three months away, the party faces a dogged uphill battle to remain in parliament under its new cochairs, Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken.

In the last four decades, the German parliamentary landscape has expanded from three to seven major parties, most of which were sooner or later integrated into an increasingly moribund political center — Die Linke included. Should BSW and Die Linke fail to demarcate themselves from that political center in the near future, the mantle of opposition will fall exclusively to the far right. Given Germany’s ongoing economic malaise and the prospect of mass job losses in heavy industry, one shudders to think what that could mean for elections to come.