The Social Democrats are fighting to regain a seat they lost in a shock result in 2005, writes DEREK SCALLYin Duisburg
AFTER FIVE years in freefall, Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) are hoping Sunday’s election in their political homeland will reverse their dwindling fortunes.
The outcome of the poll in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), home to one if five Germans, has always had a huge influence on national politics and this year will be no different.
“This poll is about who controls the direction of politics in Berlin,” says Ralf Jäger, deputy SPD leader in NRW and an MP for the city of Duisburg.
After just five years in office, Chancellor Merkel’s allies in the Christian Democrats (CDU) are struggling to retain power here.
Losing NRW – last polls show CDU and SPD with equal support – would rob Dr Merkel of her Bundesrat majority, Germany’s upper house representing the federal states and hobble her government’s policymaking ability.
For the SPD, Sunday’s poll is about reversing a decline that began here in 2005 when traditional working-class voters abandoned the party and dumped it out of office after more than four decades in power.
A shocked Chancellor Gerhard Schröder reacted to the disastrous NRW state election with a snap federal election. He hoped the risky move would shore up his dwindling power base. It didn’t, Schröder was ousted from power and his SPD limped on in Berlin as junior partner in a grand coalition with Angela Merkel.
After four years in political suspended animation, the SPD hit rock bottom in last September’s general election with a historical low of just 23 per cent. Now the SPD has to deliver a hopeful signal in NRW on Sunday or else the party’s ongoing identity crisis will turn existential.
In the old industrial city of Duisburg, the SPD historically pulled in more than 50 per cent support from voters working in the steel factories of Thyssen and Krupp. After the shock of 2005, though, politicians like Jäger are taking nothing for granted.
“We had lost contact with people, it’s that simple,” says Jäger, a classic example of SPD- made-good. He grew up in his mother’s pub, in the shadow of the local Thyssen steel factory.
From university he watched the Rhein-Ruhr heavy industry decline and die, taking with it the SPD’s century-old power base: workers who were members of the party as well as the union.
Now, with industry shuttered or shrunken, Duisburg is in debt and struggles to manage a 13 per cent jobless rate of unqualified workers – many SPD voters who walked away in 2005 in protest at the labour market reforms.
“They abandoned what they stood for and were so far away from their voters in the end,” says Herbert Gerster, an unemployed former industrial worker in a Duisburg cafe.
“I know from their manifesto that I should vote for the SPD, but I still feel betrayed.”
In another Duisburg cafe, Jäger and local Green candidates are briefing local journalists. Their message: the two parties have huge common ground on education, energy and other policy points.
All the journalists here want to talk about though is the Left Party, an alliance of reformed East German communists and disillusioned SPD voters who soaked up the reform protest vote in 2005.
After good election results elsewhere, the NRW party may cross the 5 per cent hurdle here to enter the Landtag or state parliament.
The SPD is unwilling to be pinned down on whether it would form a coalition with the Left Party: a pre-election Yes might push floating voters into the arms of its CDU rivals while a No might repel disillusioned Left Party voters from returning to the SPD fold.
“The problem is that the Left Party here is filled with particularly hardcore old communists,” says Ralf Welters, a Green Party candidate in Duisburg.
“For now the Left Party is where the Greens were in 1980: demonised by the mainstream.
“We’d prefer to let the party clear out its hardcore members by themselves before we consider sharing power with them.”
After five years in opposition, Jäger says his SPD has renewed its policies and personnel and is ready to rule again. However his party is a house divided: the left wing and a more industry-friendly right wing are still arguing – five years on – over whether to disown the Schröder era reforms.
That has left Duisburg voters torn between a traditional loyalty to the SPD and a feeling that the party is too distracted by internal power battles to address the region’s structural problems.
“We were voted out because we had stopped seeing that we weren’t getting things right,” Jäger says, confident his party has changed.
“The new SPD is more realistic, more humble and more honest: we don’t promise jobs any more because we can’t.”