Infighting breaks out among Social Democrats (News Feature)

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Sep 29, 2009, 15:20 GMT

   Berlin - Licking their wounds after an historic electoral defeat, Germany's Social Democrats turned their anger against one another Tuesday, amid signs their movement might never recover.

   The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had crashed Sunday to its worst electoral result since the Second World War, winning only 23 per cent of German votes.

   Comparing its troubles to those of the French Socialist Party, some commentators suggested this week that Social Democratic ideology could never again enthuse a majority of society.

   The first head rolled, with the party general secretary, Hubertus Heil, offering his resignation. Party leader Franz Muentefering indicated that he too would not seek re-election as chairman in November.

   An old divide reopened between the party left, which seeks an expansion of social welfare, and party centrists, including the lead election candidate, outgoing Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who say Germany cannot afford this.

   The party's city of Berlin chapter, which is leftist, passed a resolution calling for Steinmeier too to go.

   The head of the city of Berlin chapter, Michael Mueller, said he would prefer a panel of experienced figures to take charge, including a woman leftist, Andrea Nahles, two outgoing ministers, Sigmar Gabriel and Olaf Scholz, and the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit.

   Leftist voices demanded a re-alignment of policy, with the party renouncing both the welfare spending cuts it made under former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and its assistance to Chancellor Angela Merkel in raising the German age of pension eligibility to 67.

   Such changes would bring the SPD into line with the Left Party, a hard left group which captured nearly 12 per cent of the vote Sunday.

   But they would also mark an end to the Social Democrats' bid to capture the middle ground of politics, a move pioneered by Schroeder in Germany and former British prime minister Tony Blair with his 'New Labour' policies.

   Commentators have repeatedly stressed in recent years that rival parties have 'stolen the SPD's clothes,' with all the main German parties committed to a social-welfare system protecting Germans from the cradle to the grave.

   Germany emerged from this election with five substantial political parties in parliament. The smallest, the Greens, who reject a leftist label, won nearly 11 per cent of the votes.

   Between them, the SPD and the Left Party won only 35 per cent of the vote on Sunday, a far cry from the pinnacle of SPD influence in 1972, when on its own it won nearly 46 per cent.

   Kurt Kister, a commentator for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, said Sunday's poll showed a majority of Germans were now stably centre-right, adding 'What's the use of Germany having two leftist parties which will have to share a non-growing share of the votes?'

   Even before the election, the conservative newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, suggested the SPD was like a dying brand, haemorrhaging sales.

   'It can happen in full public view, yet seem inconceivable. You may think that institutions which existed before you were born cannot fail, and forget that most of them have actually done just that,' said the paper.

   The SPD, founded in 1869 and as such seen as the 'mother' of all the European Social Democratic parties, was now trapped, with no other option but to veer left and try to win back voters from its Left Party rival, author Volker Zastrow said.

   Tuesday's infighting, with a series of middle-rank SPD figures demanding 'distinctive' policies, suggested that precisely this lurch to the left was already under way.

Steinmeier staked out his line of defence, reportedly telling his critics behind closed doors in Berlin that he would never renege on the Schroeder welfare reforms. The battle could play out until a party congress in November in Dresden.

   Jens Borchert, a University of Frankfurt political scientist, said in a newspaper interview that the day of mass parties like the SPD or Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union was in any case over.

   'I think it's impossible that they will return to their former strength,' he told the Frankfurt newspaper.

   As the SPD reviewed the shambles, its British associate, the Labour Party, appeared to be in dire straits too, with a poll suggesting Prime Minister Gordon Brown's party could only count on the votes of 25 per cent of Britons.

   Franz Walter, a political scientist at the University of Goettingen and himself an SPD supporter, wrote this week that the German party needed to decide if it represents the working class only or a broader band of salaried Germans.

But he said the party might make the mistake of trying to muddle through with the same personalities and policies that had 'ignored hundreds of thousands of its members, put off millions of voters and nearly wiped out working-class pride.'