September 22, 2017 - Berlin, Germany - Martin Schulz at an SPD rally. Michael Debets/Zuma Press/PA Images
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On Sunday, we’ll find out how members of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) voted on whether to enter into a ‘grand coalition’ with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
Whichever way it goes, the vote is an absurdity. A grand coalition is an agreement between the major parties in a democracy to form a government (thereby leaving the minor parties in opposition).
Germany, however, only has one major party – Merkel’s lot. The Social Democrats have lost their old status and must be counted among the minor parties. Indeed, they can’t even count on being the biggest of the minor parties; some polls now show them on roughly the same share of the vote as the populist AfD.
How did it come to this, not just for the SPD, but for left-wing parties across Europe?
It’s a phenomenon that Jan Rovny contemplates in a blog post for the LSE’s EUROPP blog:
“Last year was an ‘annus horribilis’ for the European left. In Austria, France, and the Czech Republic, the left lost its governing position, and the same might occur in Italy in a few weeks. Today, only Portugal, Greece, Sweden, Slovakia, and Malta are governed by the left. The 2017 collapse was precipitous. The Dutch Workers’ party went from roughly 25% to 6%; the French Socialist Party went from roughly 30% to 7%. The Czech Social Democrats went from 20% to 7%. And the Czech Communist party saw its worst result in its almost 100-year history.”
Rovny’s conclusion is not just that the Left has lost its traditional voter base, but that this base no longer exists:
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