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ID:
153295
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyses the dramatic electoral decline of German social democracy since 2003. It argues that the SPD's decision, under the leadership of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to engage in welfare state retrenchment and labour market deregulation during the ‘Hartz reforms’ (2003–05) demoralised the SPD electorate. The SPD subsequently lost half of its former electoral coalition, namely blue-collar voters and socially disadvantaged groups, while efforts to gain access to centrist and middle-class voters have failed to produce any compensating gains. While the SPD's decline from a large to a mid-sized party is part of a larger transformation of the German party system, no political recovery is possible for social democracy without a fundamental change of strategy, namely efforts to regain former voters by offering credible social welfare and redistributive policies. The SPD will not be able to delegate such policies in a ‘convoy model’ to other parties, such as the Left Party; nor will a modest ‘correction’ of the earlier course, such as has been attempted since 2009 under the leadership of current party chairman Sigmar Gabriel, be sufficient to recover lost electoral ground.
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| 2 |
ID:
161072
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| Summary/Abstract |
NOW that the new German government's unprecedentedly lengthy birth throes are over (that government isn't actually all that new), and Germany is back to its political routine, one would naturally wonder whether Russian-German relations would undergo any changes.
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| 3 |
ID:
165638
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| Summary/Abstract |
THE POLITICAL PARTY LANDSCAPE of Germany has been undergoing serious changes recently. The picture used to be quite simple: There were two large "people's" parties, and there were two smaller parties, one of which would sometimes join one of the bigger parties in a government coalition; there also were regional parties that stayed out of federal politics; and sometimes there have been "grand coalitions" - alliances of the two large parties.
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