On the 20th Sept, two Länder in Germany voted for their State Parliaments. In both Berlin and Vorpommern-Mecklenburg, the CDU vote collapsed. In both cases the SPD also lost ground, but the more serious threat for democrats is the ceding of voters from the CDU to the AfD. See Deutsche Welle’s comment on the results.
The current and previous national governments in Germany have been SPD/CDU coalitions. The current government is led by the CDU, the previous one by the SPD. It is easy to say that, despite a change in Prime Ministers, and the leading Party that the policies had not changed, but this is not true. The SPD were exceptionally timid when leading the government but by pursuing monetarist debt fetishism they failed to renew the economy and gave no hope to he country’s youth who are learning to vote for Die Linke and the ultra right AfD. The CDU led government have tried even harder to bear down on public spending.
Die Linke in Berlin, as did Mamdani in NYC, made reducing housing costs their key policy promise.
Across Europe, there has been a tendency for centrist parties to triangulate with the hard right with zero evidence that is electorally successful.
In Germany, there are two competing traditions within their political memory. The first is the hyperinflation of the 1930s, and the second of course, is the rise of fascism. The former fuels the hegemony of quantitative monetary theory and the second reminds the German pro capitalist parties of the history of the 1930s and they have resolved never to work with the successors of the Nazi party.
The CDU’s growing failure maybe a temptation to continue to pander to the AfD’s politics although the fact that the Berlin slate of Die Linke is led by the child of Turkish refugees gives some hope that Germany’s younger generations have learned different lessons.
The SPD need to rediscover their social democratic roots and the CDU need to maintain the cordon sanitaire. The CDU also need to ensure that they maintain the cordon sanitaire within the European Parliament as well as in German politics. They only have to look at the electoral prospects of their sister parties in France Italy and the UK to realise the pandering to and triangulation with the far-right will not work.
These lessons are equally applicable within the UK; the Labour Party needs to discover its own social democratic roots, learn to work with the Greens and the left nationalists and stop pandering and triangulating with Reform UK.
The only way to “fight reform” is to do the right things; fight poverty, oppose racism, and act with decency on human rights.