The SPD is losing the workers — here’s why
A fragmented working class is reshaping German politics — and leaving the SPD behind.
Dear Reader,
A few years ago, I spent a day in the life of a Syrian man working as a parcel delivery driver in Berlin. He was posting packages for a very wealthy online shopping company that would send me threatening legal letters if I were to mention its name here.
In practice, though, he wasn’t employed by them. Instead, he was working for a company at least two steps removed. His boss was a Syrian man who had worked his way up from the bottom and was running a fleet of half a dozen hired vans. He, in turn, was delivering for a larger Subunternehmen. That company may have worked directly for the trillion-dollar-company-that-must-not-be-named — or it may itself have been buffered by yet another layer of unaccountability.
At the bottom of the chain were drivers who spoke no German, signed ‘mini-job’ contracts, and were paid cash in hand to work hours well beyond legal limits. Higher up were people with enough German to set up small companies. They, in turn, worked for larger subcontractors run by earlier waves of immigrants, such as Turks, whose language skills and contacts allowed them to build bigger firms.
It reminded me of the world described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where a Lithuanian immigrant finds work in Chicago’s meatpacking industry at the turn of the 20th century. The central character, Jurgis, soon realises that access to better jobs depends less on effort than on which ethnic network you belong to. Among workers, there is a hierarchy: earlier arrivals control better positions, while newer arrivals are left with the hardest labour. The Irish, in Sinclair’s telling, sat near the top, controlling access to unions and political networks.
The result was not class solidarity but competition. Workers were not only fighting industrialists; they were also competing among themselves.
This dynamic has long been cited as one reason why the United States never developed a strong labour party. The decades in which socialist movements rose across Europe were also those in which the US received its largest wave of immigrants. Instead of consolidating into a single bloc, the American working class remained divided along lines of language, culture and origin.
It may be worth revisiting that history to understand what is happening in Germany today.
Like the United States then, Germany has experienced a massive influx of low-skilled migration over the past decade. In parts of the labour market, the result is not integration into a unified working class, but segmentation.
At a state election in Rhineland-Palatinate on Sunday, the SPD — the traditional party of the working classes — lost around ten percentage points, surrendering its long-held dominance. The centre-right CDU edged ahead. But the real gains were made by the AfD.
The hard-right party more than doubled its vote share to around 20 percent. Among working-class voters, its support was far higher — approaching 40 percent — making it the most popular party among those in manual occupations. It performed particularly strongly in cities such as Kaiserslautern and Ludwigshafen, once SPD strongholds.
This continues a broader pattern. In Baden-Württemberg earlier this month, the SPD collapsed to just 6.5 percent. There, too, the AfD made gains in urban areas characterised by lower wages and high levels of recent immigration.
At last year’s national election, the AfD also performed strongly among working-class voters, far outpacing the SPD.
Since Sunday, AfD leaders have declared themselves to be “Germany’s new labour party.” On the face of it, that is a strange claim. The AfD advocates lower taxes and reduced welfare spending; its candidate for state leader in Rhineland-Palatinate said the state should focus on policing, schooling and road maintenance and otherwise “stay out of people’s lives.”
I’m not sure what the fathers of Germany’s labour movement — August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht — would have made of that.
Trade union bosses remain closely aligned with the SPD, and the German Federation of Trade Unions (DGB) calls the AfD the “enemy of the workers.” Nonetheless, the party has made efforts to expand its influence within trade unions, and there are signs of growing support among the rank and file. A new AfD-linked trade union has even begun to appear on some factory floors.
Part of this shift reflects economic disconnect — particularly around energy and industrial policy. Union bosses have broadly supported decarbonisation, even as rising energy costs have put pressure on industrial jobs. In Rhineland-Palatinate, where chemicals giant BASF has been hit hard by high energy prices, the AfD has tapped into fears that these policies are killing off unionised jobs.
But it also reflects something else: a fragmentation of the working class itself.
Trade union representatives have told Die Zeit that they avoid discussing solidarity with recent migrants on factory floors for fear of backlash. In sectors where migrant labour is concentrated in precarious, low-paid roles, workers perceive direct competition — particularly over wages, housing and public services.
This tension was especially visible in the election campaign around housing. While the hard-left Die Linke called for a major expansion of public housing, the AfD promised to reduce demand by starting mass deportations of non-EU migrants.
The SPD first began to lose its working-class base after introducing labour market liberalisation two decades ago — reforms that expanded the low-wage sector while cutting unemployment. But white working-class voters have not migrated to Die Linke, which pledges to reverse those reforms. The hard-left party failed to make it into the state parliament in both elections this month; it has traction only in constituencies with older immigrant populations, who rally behind both its economic platform and its focus on Middle Eastern politics.
In early 20th-century America, working class fragmentation prevented the emergence of a unified labour movement. Workers did not act as a class because they did not see themselves as one. They arrived in waves, competed for position, and organised along ethnic lines rather than economic ones.
Germany is not Chicago in 1900. But in parts of its labour market, similar splits are emerging. A working class divided along cultural lines is harder to organise into a single political bloc. Where that bloc fails to form, politics fragments into competing group interests.
Whether that is detrimental to the country overall is a moot point. The US certainly did not do too badly in the 20th century.
But it does help us to understand where things are headed.
Predictably, the SPD has fallen into its well-worn routine of blaming its leadership for its latest electoral humiliation. Fresh personnel at the top, already attempted countless times before, is seen as the cure. However, a fundamental fragmentation of the working class may explain why the SPD is in fact helpless to prevent its own demise.
News in Brief
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