A bellwether of broader national struggles?

After the Social Democrats slumped to defeat in local elections in their west German heartlands, are we about to witness a repeat of the Scholz years?

Exactly one year ago, Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) were in high spirits.

They had just come out on top in the Brandenburg state election in September 2024, narrowly and unexpectedly beating the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which had been surging in popularity across eastern Germany.

The victory, while only by a few percentage points, gave the struggling party a renewed burst of optimism. The mood was clear: ‘If we can do it in the east, we can do it everywhere.’

“I, as party leader, want us to win the national parliamentary election,” SPD leader Lars Klingbeil declared at the time. “That’s 12 months away, and we will fight together.”

Fast forward a year, and the reality looks quite different from what Klingbeil had hoped. For one, national elections were already held in February after SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular government collapsed the previous autumn. In that vote, the SPD recorded its worst national results in post-war Germany at 16.4 percent.

Now the party has suffered another big setback — this time in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. Once the SPD’s industrial stronghold, NRW delivered a sobering result in local council elections on Sunday: the Social Democrats won just 22.1 percent of the vote. While only 2.2 points lower than their 2020 tally, it marked their worst post-war performance in local elections in the state.

The AfD, meanwhile, secured 14.5 percent, a surge of 9.4 points. The CDU held on as the strongest party with 33.3 percent.

Duisburg, one of the cities in NRW where the SPD has been losing support. Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Anger at welfare fraud

Gelsenkirchen, where the AfD enjoyed its largest gains, has become the poster child around Germany for voters jumping ship from mainstream parties. There, the AfD finished second with 29.9 percent of the vote, a full 17 points higher than in 2020.

Once a prosperous hub of coal and steel, the city now suffers from some of Germany’s highest unemployment and poverty rates, with no signs of improvement. Rising crime and the presence of migrants perceived as exploiting the welfare system have further fuelled discontent. Long a bastion of SPD dominance, the city now epitomises the party’s decline in its traditional heartlands.

“The AfD is strong everywhere people have lost faith that things will get better for them,” observed NRW SPD co-chair Sarah Philipp after the vote.

Yet the SPD remains divided on how to improve its standing. Some party grandees, like Labour Minister Bärbel Bas, argue that “Germany is a rich country” and can continue providing generous social services to residents. Others, like Duisburg mayor Sören Link, rage against foreign mafias who “screw over” the social system and want the party to make clear that they are on the side of “the working classes who get up early to go to work.”

The warning signs in NRW are stark: voter turnout was the highest in 30 years, underscoring that residents care deeply about bread-and-butter issues like economic stability, security, and public services. But unless the SPD unifies around a coherent programme, local setbacks risk snowballing into broader electoral collapse.

Photo of Gelsenkirchen by Robert Schwarz on Unsplash

‘Life-threatening’ crisis

The consequences could reverberate nationally. A more anxious and unpredictable SPD will make governing harder in Berlin — and as the Scholz era showed, instability at the top rarely ends well for coalitions.

While Labour Minister Bas insisted the NRW result was not the “disaster” she feared, the combination of SPD decline and AfD surge has triggered deep soul-searching in a party that still sees itself as the voice of working-class Germany.

The AfD’s threefold rise in just five years is “disturbing,” said former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD), who represents Leverkusen. He urged the SPD to sharpen its focus on low-income workers struggling with rising costs — the very demographic the AfD has been siphoning away.

SPD MP Ralf Stegner went further, warning in Der Spiegel that the party’s result is “extremely dangerous, perhaps even life-threatening.” His prescription: more “passion” from the leadership - and a course that veers further left.

There are echoes of the last electoral cycle here. When the Free Democrats (FDP) were junior partners in the traffic light coalition and began losing local elections, it set off a slump that led to them falling out of the Bundestag at the last election.

As the FDP began losing locally, long-time supporters shifted to other parties, often the CDU or the AfD, which promised stronger action in areas like economic reform. That dynamic led nervous FDP backbenchers to demand that their leadership take a more decisive line in Berlin, which in turn destabilised and eventually toppled the Scholz government.

Similarly, in NRW many traditional SPD voters have migrated to the AfD, particularly in regions where economic or social anxieties run high. For the SPD, the elections in NRW are a bellwether of broader national struggles — at a time when it is still possible to change course.

For now, the AfD has not yet won a mayoral race in western Germany. But in three major NRW cities — Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg, and Hagen — its candidates have advanced to the Stichwahl (run-off elections) on September 28th. All eyes will be on whether the AfD can crack this symbolic barrier.

What happens in these cities may well determine whether the SPD’s crisis remains a regional tremor — or escalates into a full-scale national earthquake.

Useful links:

• The Duisburg tower block that’s notorious for welfare exploitation

• What's the secret to Leverkusen's success?

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Last week’s poll: Will the car industry still be the backbone of the German economy in 10 years’ time?

• Yes - 33%

• No - 66%

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News in brief:

• 💶 Cabinet approves tax relief measures – Germany’s cabinet has approved a series of tax relief measures, including a plan to significantly cut the VAT (value-added tax) on the restaurant and catering industry starting in 2026. All food providers — from cafes to catering services for daycare centres (Kitas) and hospitals — will see their VAT rate reduced from 19 percent to seven percent. The reduction will apply only to food, not drinks, and is expected to save businesses and customers around €3.6 billion a year. Other measures include increasing the commuter allowance by eight cents per kilometre, re-introducing subsidies for agricultural diesel, and raising the Ehrenamtspauschale allowance for volunteers. Before taking effect, the draft legislation must still be approved by the Bundestag (lower house) and Bundesrat (upper house).

• 🇵🇱 Poland offered security guarantees – Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, made his first official visit to Berlin on Tuesday, once again calling for reparations for the Second World War — a long-standing demand from Warsaw that Berlin continues to reject. This time, however, Germany offered a different form of compromise: security guarantees. “The message for the Polish president should be that any strengthening of Poland’s security is a strengthening of Germany’s security, whether it be financial aid, weapons systems or Bundeswehr units,” Knut Abraham (CDU), the government’s point man for Polish relations, told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. Following a Russian drone attack last week that reached Polish — and NATO — territory, Germany has also been working on ways to bolster air defences.

• 🏀 Germany crowned basketball champion – Germany is known worldwide as a Fußballnation, but on Sunday it proved its strength in another sport, winning the EuroBasket tournament for the first time since 1993. The national team now holds both continental and world titles, having also won the FIBA World Cup in 2023. These back-to-back victories put Germany on par with basketball powerhouses such as the US and Serbia.

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Sincerely,

Rachel Stern