The Die Linke Problem

To understand the severity of the German Social Democrats’ problem, you need to consider that not only is the growing Die Linke party cutting into their voting base but the prospects for forming some kind of broad left-wing coalition that would embrace the SPD the Greens and Die Linke all together are very bad. Linke partially arises out of the old regime in East Germany and that on its own terms makes the idea of a government including the party anathema to many Germans. And the less-unacceptable non-Communist portion of the Linke leadership consists of people who left the SPD to forge an alliance with the Communists as part of a quasi-personal feud with SPD leaders.

For an illustration of the challenges involved it’s instructing to look at what happened recently in the state government of Hesse. In 2008, the Hesse SPD ran promising to try to forge a coalition with the Greens and the CDU promised to try to forge a coalition with the FDP. But the way the election worked out, neither Red-Green nor Black-Yellow had a majority. But CDU and SPD couldn’t work out a grand coalition. So after a great deal of wrangling, the SPD leadership put together a Red-Green coalition government that had tacit support from Die Linke. Even this was too much for some of the SPD delegates who rebelled against the party leadership. That eventually led to a new election in which the local SPD chief admitted that, yes, she was going to seek to build a Red-Red-Green broad left coalition. As a result, the party’s share of the vote dropped from 36.7 percent in 2008 to 23.7 in 2009.

Long story short, a lot would have to change about Die Linke and about Germany before it could participate in a federal coalition government.