Is the SPD heading for political extinction?
In modern German elections, parties only need a small slice of popular approval to win. That strange arithmetic could yet save the SPD in Rhineland-Palatinate.
Dear Reader,
Superwahljahr 2026 — super election year 2026 — has begun, and things have not started well for the Social Democrats, Germany’s oldest party and the political home of chancellors such as Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and (ahem) Gerhard Schröder.
In Baden-Württemberg on Sunday, the Social Democrats won just 5.5 percent of the vote, putting them perilously close to dropping out of parliament altogether by missing the 5 percent threshold required to gain seats in the state legislature.
With four more state elections to go this year (out of a total of 16), the result has led to chatter about the SPD entering a death spiral into political obscurity.
Comparisons have been made with the Free Democrats, Germany’s traditional liberal party, which — also a junior partner in a quarrelling centrist coalition — suffered a series of disastrous results in state elections that ultimately scared them into blowing up Olaf Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition. The Free Democrats now exist in something like an artificial coma. Technically they are still a functioning party, but the signs of life are so faint that they barely register in polling.
Next up is the state election in Rhineland-Palatinate, the state I moved to back in September. If the Social Democrats need to see a chink of light, perhaps I can provide it. I at least know who their candidate is — which is more than I can say for their rivals.
With a population of 4 million, Rhineland-Palatinate (RLP) sits firmly in the mid-table among Germany’s 16 states. It is nowhere near the big hitters like North Rhine-Westphalia (18 million) and Bavaria (13 million), but also well above minnows like Saarland and Bremen. Nonetheless, without a major city within its borders, RLP feels more obscure than similarly sized states such as Berlin, Saxony or Hessen.
Learning the names of local politicians sat somewhere rather lower on my list of priorities than learning the difference between a Riesling and a Grauburgunder. For me, it was a political blank slate.
Over the months, I became aware that an SPD politician called Alexander Schweitzer was the local minister-president. It turns out that he has never actually won an election, but took over two years ago when his popular predecessor retired due to ill health. That gives him a small advantage over the competition. Most people are vaguely aware of who he is and could probably just about put a face to the name. Polling back in the autumn showed that roughly a quarter of voters in RLP wanted him as their next minister-president — a figure that likely reflected how few people knew who he was rather than any strong opinions about his political views.
With under a fortnight to go until the election, I have good news for the Social Democrats: before sitting down to write this article, I still didn’t know the name of the CDU candidate. On the other hand, it has been impossible to escape the billboards telling me about Mr Schweitzer’s uniquely Palatine characteristics, including that he is “determined”, “strong” and “caring”. An SPD pamphlet even made its way into our toilet literature. Recently, while attending a call of nature, I had the unexpected pleasure of learning that he still lives in the village where he was born in the wine region in the south of the state, that he married his childhood sweetheart, and that he is a fan of the soap opera Lindenstraße.
Just knowing who the candidate is matters in state elections, where the “parties of the middle” are increasingly fighting over the same middle-class and retired voters whose living standards are maintained by pushing the costs into additional government debt. Due to freedom of movement and other migration flows, Germany’s working class is steadily disenfranchised — roughly a third of workers in low-paid jobs have no voting rights. The Germans still left in working-class neighbourhoods either do not turn out to vote or cast their ballot for the AfD.
The “centrist parties” — CDU, SPD and Greens — may poll at up to 30 percent of the vote. But given that roughly 20 percent of adults can’t vote, and turnout is usually around 70 percent, a party only needs the support of roughly one in five adults to be on course for victory.
The differences between these parties lie mostly in nuance. Essentially, they are competing for votes from the broad middle classes: from well-unionised employees in the public sector and major industry, to staff in family-owned companies (the Mittelstand) and the professional classes. All of the parties broadly agree on maintaining the status quo when it comes to the pension system, the balance of power between unions and employers, and subsidies for rooftop solar panels.
In Rhineland-Palatinate the political geography looks much like Baden-Württemberg. Low-income towns with high immigrant populations — places like Pforzheim or Ludwigshafen — tend to go to the AfD, although given that a third of residents lack voting rights, we are still talking about perhaps one in ten adults actually supporting the anti-immigration party. Wealthier cities such as Mainz or Stuttgart tend to favour the SPD or the Greens, while the countryside votes broadly for the CDU.
The Green candidate in Baden-Württemberg was able to win a narrow victory over the CDU largely by being more recognisable — and by stridently advocating CDU-style policies on issues that threaten local jobs. Green candidate Cem Özdemir has been on the national political scene for donkey’s years, having led the Green party into a federal election and served as minister of agriculture under Olaf Scholz. As the first Bundestag lawmaker with Turkish roots, Özdemir is also perhaps Germany’s most famous success story of the Gastarbeiter generation.
Much was made in the press of the fact that Özdemir would become the first German state premier from an ethnic minority — a remarkable fact. Yet on the campaign trail his pledges on migration, including calls for much stronger controls on illegal border crossings, were largely indistinguishable from those of the CDU candidate. His advocacy of large subsidies for the state’s car industry also placed him squarely within the Social Democratic tradition of industrial policy.
He was up against a CDU candidate who was only 38 and whose policy proposals were broadly indistinguishable from Özdemir’s. By election day, the only thing most voters knew about the CDU candidate, Manuel Hagel, was that he had once cooed on television over the “doey brown eyes” of an underage girl he met while visiting a school to talk about politics.
In a broadly affluent state like Rhineland-Palatinate — where the Social Democrats already hold the minister-presidency — their chances of victory therefore look reasonably good. Whereas in Baden-Württemberg, pre-election polling was predicting a photo finish between the Greens and CDU with both on around 28 percent, here the SPD are tied with the CDU on 28 percent with the Greens the third wheel.
Like Özdemir, Schweitzer is an advocate of policies that protect the status quo: he supports the multi-billion-euro subsidies that keep the lights on in energy-intensive factories (in this case chemical giant BASF), he wants to tighten sanctions on unemployed people who do not seek work, and he opposes raising the retirement age.
There are good reasons to question whether such policies will ultimately secure Germany’s long-term economic interests. But they are probably the right ones for winning the middle-class approval that secures victory in a state election in comfortable south-west Germany.
For the SPD, a win in Rhineland-Palatinate would offer a brief moment of relief — before the party heads into a series of state elections in eastern Germany later this year where the real political storm awaits.
News in Brief
“Ve got you in ze end, Tommy!” One of the UK’s oldest newspapers, The Telegraph, has been bought by German publishing house Axel Springer, the owner of Bild Zeitung and Die Welt. A penny for the thoughts of the conservative publication’s proudly pro-Brexit readership.
Volkswagen AG — the company that owns VW, Porsche and Audi — has published its accounts for 2025, and the headline number is a 44 percent drop in profits. Porsche’s profits fell by an astonishing 90 percent.
The company is trying to reassure shareholders by saying the drop reflects internal “restructuring” as it invests heavily in electromobility. It also says US tariffs have squeezed margins. Another interpretation is that Germany’s largest carmaker has simply been outplayed by competition from China.
Another story from the strange world of German domestic spying: an annual award for the country’s best bookshops has been hit by scandal after Wolfram Weimer, the culture minister, banned three bookshops from receiving the prize based on unspecified allegations made against them by the BfV intelligence agency. All three bookshops are left-wing; one reportedly has a message on its exterior wall reading “Germany die!” After receiving heavy blowback from the left-wing cultural scene, Weimer has now cancelled the awards altogether. Few seem to have noticed the irony that a bookshop calling for Germany to die was perfectly happy to receive a financial reward from the federal government.