© REUTERS/Michele Tantussi

SPD party leader Andrea Nahles resigned on Sunday after a disastrous week in which the Social Democrats won only 16 percent of the vote in the European elections (11.5 percent less than in 2014) and lost to the CDU in the city state of Bremen, a traditional party stronghold it has governed for over 70 years.

In the aftermath, a bitter debate erupted within the party over how to respond—and whether it was worth staying in government with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU if voters weren’t recognizing or satisfied with their work. Nahles, the person in the SPD leadership most supportive of the present “grand coalition,” or GroKo, initially went on the offensive, moving up the election for leader of the parliamentary group from September until Tuesday.

But by the weekend, it was to clear that Nashles simply didn’t have the support of her colleagues. The woman who spent 30 years working her way up the party ladder stepped down in a matter of days, having hung on to the job just a few months longer than her predecessor Martin Schulz.

How did it happen? The dust is still settling, but other Social Democrats have spoken openly about the infighting that went on behind closed doors. Members of a party promising “justice and solidarity” should “never, never, never again treat each other like we did in the past few weeks,” wrote Kevin Kühnert, the influential head of the party’s youth wing. Michael Roth, the minister of state for Europe, tweeted that some of his colleagues “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Even Nahles’ opponents had warm words for her. Merkel praised her “fine character,” FDP head Christian Lindner her “honesty and competence.” SPD supporters, meanwhile, drew attention to her concrete achievements, such as pushing through a national minimum wage against CDU opposition when she was labor minister in the previous coalition.

One Leaves, Three Enter

Evidently, though, these achievements did nothing to stop Germans from voting for the SPD’s competitors. The fact that the chancellor was introduced to graduating Harvard students last Thursday as the person who “introduced the minimum wage” says everything about the perils of being a junior partner in government. Citizens don’t always know who to blame—or who to credit.

The SPD does not yet have a replacement lined up; the party leadership will temporarily be held by three politicians: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern premier, Manuela Schwesig, Rhineland-Palatinate premier, Malu Dreyer, and the boss of the SPD in Hessen, Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel. As the most prominent Social Democrat on the federal level, Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz will certainly be in the mix for the top job, although on Sunday night appearing on talk show Anne Will, he said he wasn’t interested.

But that’s a personnel decision, not a decision about the future of the party or the coalition governing Germany as such. The SPD remains in an exceptionally difficult position: Can it afford to leave the government and risk triggering fresh elections at a time when it is well behind both the CDU and the surging Greens in the polls? Or, from another perspective: With the party stumbling from crisis to crisis and haemorrhaging support, can it afford not to?

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© REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

For Germany, the European elections on May 26 offer three particular insights: First, in this rapidly ageing country, politics are becoming generational, pitting the young against the old. Second, the rise of the Greens and the decline of the Social Democrats, the country’s oldest democratic party, is happening faster and faster. Third, given the sharp losses incurred by Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc, the GroKo—the country’s grand coalition (Grosse Koalition) of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats—is in for times of high tension and uncertainty.

In today’s Germany, the Greens at 20.8 percent have become the second largest party, leaving the SPD far behind. In comparison to the last federal elections in 2017, a total of 1.5 million Social Democratic and 1.2 million conservative voters went over the Greens, setting historic records all around. The most important aspect, however, of this shift is the generational divide that is opening up: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats are for old people; the Greens attract the young. Among 18- to 24-year olds, every third voter opted for them on Sunday; informal polls in schools give them an even higher percentage with teenagers.

Shifting Political Grounds

The fear of climate change and worsening damage to the global environment is the biggest single reason for this shift. 2018 was an extremely hot and dry year in Germany, bringing the reality of climate change home. Merkel, who was once known as the Klimakanzlerin (climate chancellor), has had to admit that Germany will not reach the emissions goals her government has set. Reports about the extinction of ever more species on earth and about plastic trash found in the deepest parts of the ocean and on the most remote islands have added to the shock.

Add to this the powerful effect of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement. The political drive started by the 16-year old Swede brings tens of thousands of school children to the streets every Friday to call for action on climate change. Rarely has a political issue so explicitly set the young against the old. Germany’s established parties have painfully learnt that their paternalistic first reaction—a pat on the back for young people getting engaged in politics—did not go over all that well.

Catering to the Old

It’s not just about climate change, either. Both the Social and Christian Democrats are old parties, with an age average of members of 60 years, and GroKo policies cater largely to this public, delivering benefits worth tens of billions of euros to pensioners. Whereas pensioners have seen their income rise by more than ten percent since the financial crisis of 2007, young people’s income has mostly stagnated. Low earnings and uncertain jobs translate into a much higher risk of poverty for the young. Yet Merkel’s coalition continues to squabble over how to dole out more money to the old.

It’s not just content, its’s packaging, too. It became painfully obvious just how out of tune the Christian Democrats are with digitalization and social media when, in the run-up to the election, a YouTuber called Rezo got millions of people to watch him ranting against the CDU. Merkel’s successor at the helm of the party, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, didn’t quite seem up to modern times when she responded with an eleven-page PDF (!) document.

No Spring Chickens

The Greens aren’t exactly spring chickens, either; the average age of their members is 50. But not only do they manage to come across as hip and successful—a group you would like to join—but their competence, the environment, has made a huge comeback. The Greens also have a clear-cut, positive message about EU integration and about immigration, which gave them a forceful European message for the election campaign. This has translated into enormous credibility: a staggering 57 percent of all voters in Germany, according to pollsters infrastest dimap, say that the values that are important are represented by the Greens.

Interestingly enough, the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had a similarly clear if euroskeptic message which gained them a solid 11 percent of the votes overall, but with much stronger results in the formerly communist east, where resentment and xenophobia run high. But overall, Manfred Güllner from polling institute Forsa said, the AfD was likely to have reached the limits of its potential with voters susceptible to extreme right-wing ideas.

Anything But Stable

Yet even with the AfD plateauing, German politics will be far from stable over the coming months. The CDU, badly shaken by registering a result below 30 percent, may be feeling the pressure to replace Merkel as chancellor sooner rather than later–possibly not even with Kramp-Karrenbauer, who has lost a lot of her initial glow. Still, in comparison to Merkel’s junior partner in government, the Social Democrats, Merkel and Kramp-Karrenbauer are all laughs.

For the SPD, the European elections represent a terrifying realization: they still haven’t hit rock bottom. From 27.3 percent five years ago, they have fallen to 15.8 percent, which means that they have lost their position as runner-up to the chancellery and power broker to the Greens. Even more humiliating was the result in Bremen, Germany’s smallest federal state, which on the day of the European elections also voted for a new state parliament. For the first time since World War II, the SPD came in second, leaving the lead to the CDU candidate, a blunt entrepreneur with little political experience.

Such a defeat would under most circumstances make changes at the top of the party inevitable—were it not for the fact that the SPD has been using up leaders at alarming speed anyway. Current head Andrea Nahles is the eight party leader to try to get the better of Merkel’s CDU. Any potential successors may also find it convenient to keep Nahles in place until the fall, so that she can take the blame if the SPD gets battered in another round of regional elections.

Losers may try to cling together to avoid collapse; or they can trample each other in the scramble to reach firmer land. In the immediate aftermath of the European elections, Angela Merkel’s grand coalition appears to be choosing the former. But as the SPD gets more and more desperate, and as the CDU’s fear grows that it may be entering a similar downhill path, all bets are off. It will be interesting times for German politics.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Four months of wrangling over a new government coalition have left Germany’s political establishment badly bruised. Chancellor Angela Merkel has lost much of her authority; for the leader of the Social Democrats, Martin Schulz, it’s been even worse. When coalition negotiations finally began on January 26, the SPD’s ratings in the polls sank to 19 percent, a new record low.

Yet as the deeply divided party struggles to make the best out of several more years as junior partner to Merkel’s conservatives, a new leadership hope has emerged. Andrea Nahles, 47, the leader of the Social Democrats in the Bundestag, looks likely to take over from Schulz sooner rather than later. The next step for this feisty, outspoken career politician could then be a run for chancellor.

In many ways, Nahles is the anti-Merkel. Angela Merkel, daughter of a protestant pastor in Brandenburg, had a career as a physicist in East Germany. Andrea Nahles, a devout Catholic, grew up in the rural Eifel region in the very west of West Germany, studied literature, and spent her entire professional life in politics.

Merkel has said many times that she could never have imagined the fall of the Berlin Wall and a life in the Federal Republic. In contrast, any portrait of Nahles is certain to mention her school yearbook, where at the age of 19 Nahles described her ambitions in life as “house wife or federal chancellor.” As one recent observer wryly mentioned, she has missed out on the first.

Where Merkel, as a latecomer to politics, has always kept a certain distance from her own party, Nahles has spent her entire adult life in the SPD. Just like Gerhard Schröder, the last SPD politician to make it into the chancellery, Nahles built her career in the Jusos (Young Socialists). The SPD’s youth organisation is known as a fierce training ground for any aspiring leader, calling for strategic finesse and ruthlessness as well as networking skills.

In general, the Jusos are more leftist than the SPD, and Nahles, their national leader from 1995 to 1999, used to be highly vocal about social injustice and the need for a wealth tax. Her outspokenness – sometimes earthy, sometimes vulgar, but always loud—earned her praise from then-SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine, who called her “God’s gift to the SPD.” The wider public, however, didn’t like her much. Ever since, Nahles has been hampered by a reputation for being shrill—a handicap she will have to overcome if she really wants to be chancellor one day.

A Strategic Mind

There is no doubt that she has a brilliant strategic mind. In the early 2000s, Nahles was one of the first Social Democrat leaders to recognize how dangerous the new Left Party would become to the SPD. As a member of the top leadership of her party, she vehemently opposed Chancellor Schröder’s social and labor market reforms, and drew up a radical reform plan for health care insurance.

As the years went by and Nahles became first secretary general and then deputy leader of the SPD, she slowly moved toward the political center. From 2013 to 2017 she served as federal minister of labor and social affairs, a hugely difficult portfolio. Her conservative colleagues in Merkel’s cabinet didn’t particularly like her politics—introducing a minimum wage and allowing workers to retire after 45 years on the job – but they came to respect her effectiveness in managing a large public administration. At the same time, Nahles retained her gift for simple and direct language.

Yet her name never came up last year when the SPD was casting around for a candidate to challenge Merkel in the September elections. Instead, Martin Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament, became the Social Democrats’ surprise candidate for chancellor.

Schulz’ start was hugely successful, but all too soon disillusionment set in, leaving the Social Democrats with only 20.5 percent of the vote on September 24, their worst result in over 70 years. Schulz managed to hold on to his post as party leader, but was unable to claim the one office where he could be certain of high visibility over the coming years: party leadership in the Bundestag. It was Nahles who won the post.

Ever since the elections, Schulz has been struggling. Having initially declared that his party would not take part in any new government, he was forced to reverse himself when talks between Merkel’s conservatives, the Greens, and the liberals broke down. This proved very difficult to sell to the SPD’s grass roots, who believe that another four years as junior partner to Merkel will seal the party’s downfall.

No wonder the SPD’s party congress on January 22 was nervously awaited by its leadership. It seemed not at all certain that delegates would support the decision to enter formal coalition talks with Merkel. Much was expected of Schulz’ one-hour speech: This was his great chance to rouse and convince the party base. Failure, he knew, would be laid squarely at his door.

But Schulz was suffering from a bad cold, and his speech was lackluster. It was Andreas Nahles who saved the day, galvanizing the delegates in just six-and-a-half minutes. “I am a member of this party because I want to see great things achieved,” she shouted in a hoarse voice. She wasn’t afraid of new elections, she added, she was afraid of the questions voters would ask if the SPD had to campaign for the very same things that they could have implemented in government. “People are going to say that we’re bananas!”

In the end, 56 percent of delegates approved the coalition talks. Almost single-handedly, Nahles had given Merkel a chance at forming a new government, saved Martin Schulz from having to resign as party leader, and positioned herself as a possible successor. It took six-and-a-half minutes—and the skill of a lifetime in politics.

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