Germany’s oldest political party is in deep trouble. The centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have been a part of the country’s political landscape since the 19th century. Now they are staring into the abyss, as one electoral catastrophe follows another. Like their centrist sister parties across Europe, they are losing the working-class vote — and they only have themselves to blame.

The latest blow for the SPD came on Sunday, when the party lost the state-level election in Rhineland-Palatinate in the far west of Germany. The SPD came second with just 26%, a loss of nearly 10 percentage points since the last election. For the first time since 1991, the party did not win the election in a state it considers part of its heartland. Instead, the conservative CDU won decisively with 31%, and the far-Right AfD gained its best-ever result in western Germany with 19.5%.

Yet the SPD leaders acted as though this was an unforeseeable natural catastrophe befalling the party. This mirrors responses to other poor performances, including the state elections in Baden-Württemberg earlier this month, where the SPD barely managed to stay above the 5% threshold required to enter parliament. These local ballots shouldn’t have come as a shock. In the general election last year, the SPD managed 16% of the vote.

If the SPD could stomach an honest analysis of voting patterns, it could easily work out what’s going on. Take the most recent numbers in Rhineland-Palatinate. The party lost just 7,000 votes to the Left-wing Die Linke, while ceding a staggering 80,000 voters to the CDU and another 35,000 to the AfD. The loss of the working-class vote is the most striking figure behind this shift. Until 2021, the SPD was still the number-one party for this demographic in Rhineland-Palatinate. Now it’s the AfD, which achieved 39% of the vote in this group.

Working-class communities are among the most rooted in their local area, and have strong ties to national identity. They care about things like retaining a strong economy, a fair welfare system, good education for their children and a safe environment to live in. Unsurprisingly, according to polls, these were also the top priorities of voters in Rhineland-Palatinate. Yet the SPD is increasingly seen as a party for welfare recipients. One pre-election poll found that nearly three-quarters of people thought the SPD “doesn’t clearly stand on the side of working people anymore”. Even 59% of SPD voters agreed with this assessment.

Voters appear increasingly unconvinced by the SPD’s positions on key issues such as economic policy and immigration. Among young people in Rhineland-Palatinate, the loss of trust was particularly stark. According to polling, only 9% of under-35s thought the SPD had the best answers for the future. Among the under-25s, the AfD came first in the election.

Many in the SPD can see the scale of the problem, but the incentive to act is low. A shift to the Right on social issues would lead to acrimonious rifts within the party, and nobody seems to have the stomach or even the inclination to go down that route. But, as mainstream parties uphold their “firewall” against the AfD, the SPD often remains a necessary coalition partner. Rhineland-Palatinate is a classic example. The winning conservatives can only govern with the Social Democrats as a coalition partner, giving the SPD a key role.

Yet the loss of Rhineland-Palatinate should alert the party to the existential nature of its troubles. It’s now surrendering its strongholds. If it can’t — or won’t — change course, the SPD will keep managing its own decline until there is little left to manage.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. Her latest book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be released in May 2026.

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