Half the Way With Saskia E.

Esken spent six years at the top of the SPD, first alongside Walter-Borjans and then alongside Klingbeil. Yet, unusually for an antiestablishment candidate, she spent all of them as the face of a governing party. After narrowly winning the election in 2019, Esken and others who sought to “renew” the SPD had precious little time to renovate the party apparatus or install loyal functionaries in key positions, let alone revise government policy. Nor is it clear that she ever intended to do this: though Esken and her supporters certainly aspired to some vague notion of a more decisive party that staked out clearer progressive positions on socioeconomic policy (Esken herself once described this as a “clearly social democratic program of progress”), there wasn’t any plan for how to get there.

As sociologist Oliver Nachtwey noted at the time, Esken’s and Walter-Borjans’s victory was not the product of a left-wing resurgence, but rather the work of dissident factions within the apparatus who feared that further business-as-usual could endanger the party’s future, and thus their own careers. Their success rested on “internal participation,” but was not mirrored by any broader social mobilization.

Having spent most of her political life at the local level, Esken’s rapid rise remained strictly limited to the party apparatus — while simultaneously lacking the internal resources to shape it, nor the external networks to mobilize pressure from without. The result was a sincere but largely powerless “progressive” at the highest echelons of a party that had long abandoned such ambitions — something like a milquetoast Jeremy Corbyn with none of the movement credibility or popular support.

Ironically, the SPD’s comparatively left-leaning 2021 electoral campaign, a reflection of the same mood that buoyed Esken two years prior, likely played a decisive role in crowning Olaf Scholz chancellor of the ineffective and divided “traffic light coalition,” and thus locking the party into another sequence of its ongoing downward spiral.

Campaign promises of higher wages, lower energy costs, infrastructural investment, and more proved largely impossible to implement while sharing power with the ideologically neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP). Instead, the war in Ukraine that began only two months into Scholz’s tenure ensured that energy and food costs rose dramatically. By the time the government imploded late last year, it was one of the most unpopular in living memory.

Could Esken’s SPD have taken a different trajectory from the opposition bench? Probably not, given the party’s apparent predilection for preemptive capitulation, but it may have granted more space for the left wing to develop its own agenda and set the tone in parliament. Instead, Esken repeatedly found herself defending unpopular policies and disciplining the party left, lest the coalition fall apart. A bit like their Democratic colleagues in the United States, the Social Democrats once again found themselves in the awkward position of simultaneously campaigning for and against an unpopular status quo for which they themselves were largely responsible. Sooner or later, voters start to sense that something’s up, as the elections in both 2024 and 2025 showed.

Judging by her own words and actions, Esken really did seem to believe in a more social democratic SPD, and there is good reason to believe that a man in her position would not have been subjected to quite the same level of public scrutiny. Irrespective of Esken’s gender or political finesse, however, she found herself in charge of what at this point, as Jacobin contributor Hans Graudenz recently put it, is little more than a “governing machine.” What that machine achieves is largely irrelevant — it just has to keep on running. That it would chew her up and spit her out was a foregone conclusion.

Further Back and Faster

Esken’s disappointing track record, coming on top of Martin Schulz’s terrible performance eight years ago, is now being seized upon by functionaries seeking a return to the center – much like the mood in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, albeit without quite such a brutal internal purge. Programmatically, we can expect a return to the unabashed free market boosterism of Gerhard Schröder’s day, along with complicity in growing state repression and military rearmament — not least as a result of its governmental obligations.

Strategically, the SPD will continue down the path taken by most of its European siblings, rotating in and out of increasingly precarious coalition governments. That this path has already led to a “secular decline in importance,” as the SPD-aligned academics Gerd Mielke and Fedor Rose note in a recent study, does not seem to bother Klingbeil or his new leadership team.

Whether the roughly 360,000 grassroots SPD members are on board with the line of march post-Esken is somewhat less clear — though some 84 percent of them voted to approve the new government coalition in a party-wide referendum, only half bothered to participate at all, suggesting widespread disillusionment or, at best, apathy. Either way, the prospects for the party’s re-social-democratization appear grim.

For Esken stood symbolically not only for the party’s flagging left wing, but for an entire generation — the children and grandchildren of the SPD’s traditional proletarian base, who, thanks to the successful reforms of the postwar era, gained access to higher education and entered white-collar, often public sector professions. At a time when their ancestors’ proletarian milieu was gradually dissolving, they found a natural political home in the SPD. Yet this stronghold is increasingly now also eroding, as disillusioned voters drift either to the reinvigorated Die Linke, the far right, or simply stop going to the polls altogether.

It would be tempting to view social democracy’s decay as a chance for the Left. After all, a major component of the strategic wager Die Linke represented at its formation in the mid-2000s was the notion that, with the SPD increasingly neglecting its historical role as the parliamentary arm of the workers’ movement, a new socialist party could potentially overtake it from the Left and ultimately replace it.

This never came to pass — the SPD at first sought to isolate Die Linke, only to later accommodate it and even cooperate with it, comfortable in the knowledge that, much as cooperation with the CDU eroded the SPD’s base, cooperation with the Social Democrats usually did the same to Die Linke. Particularly in larger states with heavy industry, where the SPD’s roots extend deeper and it still has a strong presence in both government as well as the trade union bureaucracy, Die Linke’s voice of protest was enough to unseat social democracy’s preeminence. A few election victories weren’t enough to establish deeper roots and cultivate a durable social base.

Nor does it seem like that much about the underlying dynamic has changed since then. Die Linke may be enjoying an electoral resurgence, not to mention a real membership boom, but its institutional and social weight still pales in comparison to the SPD. Moreover, the SPD, despite — or perhaps precisely because of — its late-stage form as a “governing machine,” can offer its residual social base (particularly unionized workers) tangible benefits that a protest party cannot, especially during times of economic crisis.

When it comes to deciding which industries will receive state subsidies, which factories will be closed, or which municipalities will receive federal funding for new infrastructure, even a weakened SPD in a grand coalition can offer working people more than Die Linke in the opposition. For this reason, the frayed ties between the SPD and what remains of its traditional base are hardly likely to unravel entirely any time soon.

A Chance for the Left?

Is the answer for the Left, then, to begin laying the groundwork for a “progressive alliance” with the SPD and the Greens in 2029, as some of the usual suspects have begun to argue? Here, the answer can only be a resounding “no.” Not only is there nothing close to a majority for such a prospect (recent polls put the three parties combined at under 40 percent), but given both center-left parties’ rightward drift, it is unclear what a socialist party would have to gain in this constellation. While the SPD can expect to weather a few bad election results, Die Linke is in a much more precarious state. Without the kinds of deep social roots the SPD still possesses, at least for now, joining an unpopular coalition is a much riskier proposition.

Much has changed in German politics since the mid-2000s, above all the emergence of a far-right party that increasingly looks set to become the strongest force in parliament. Yet, in some ways, Die Linke faces a similar situation to the one it emerged from some twenty years ago, facing off against a CDU-SPD grand coalition set to launch an offensive against workers’ living standards, which at least part of the trade unions have tentatively signed on to in a bid to save jobs. In other ways, the situation is much worse. The aforementioned far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is stronger than ever, its popularity seemingly impervious to both the mass demonstrations of the last year and recent government attempts to ban the party. Where diffuse popular anger at the establishment once translated into support for a range of forces, not least Die Linke, it now flows decisively in a more sinister direction, one whose mere presence seems to drag the rest of the political landscape further to the Right. Also unlike in 2005, the social reservoirs of extraparliamentary resistance appear depleted.

Socialists will therefore need to be patient. While the SPD can withstand a few “catastrophic” election results thanks to its role as a pillar of Germany’s parliamentary democracy, the depth of Die Linke’s support and extent of its political use value is much more precarious, as recent years have shown. Without the social roots that the SPD still has, at least in some places, entering an unpopular coalition is a much riskier undertaking. And even if the SPD continues to shrink, leaving a vacuum in German society, Die Linke cannot fill it overnight. The AfD will probably be the main beneficiary.

The Left would therefore be well advised to clearly distance itself from the increasingly discredited Social Democrats and the ever-more militaristic Greens in the coming years, to build organizations at the local level, and to consolidate its marginal power resources. Governing can only be an option for the Left if it can shape that government from a position of strength. As Esken’s rise and fall demonstrated, such strength must be based on more than a few electoral successes.