Wrong turn

All the ingredients are there for a popular but profoundly misguided narrative. Ever since Denmark’s Social Democrats won the 2019 Danish election on a restrictive anti-migration platform against a collapsing far-right vote, political commentators have been quick to propose a similar strategy whenever a social democratic party is in trouble elsewhere in Europe.

At first glance, the outcome of Germany’s 2025 snap election seems to lend weight to such advice. On 23 February 2025, Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffered its worst result since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1919. With only 16 per cent of the vote – a fall of more than 9 per cent compared to its surprise comeback in 2021 – the party fell from first to third place, behind the far-right AfD and an increasingly right-wing CDU/CSU. After a campaign dominated by debates over migration, almost 2.5 million voters who cast their ballot for the SPD in 2021 voted for the right or far right, more than double the SPD’s losses to parties on the left. The losses were particularly disastrous for the Social Democrats among large parts of their traditional core base. A mere 12 per cent of blue-collar workers (down14 per centage points) and 13 per cent of the unemployed (-10) voted SPD, whereas the AfD won 38 per cent (+17) and 34 per cent (+17) respectively.

However, it would be wrong to expect the SPD to bounce back if it followed the ‘Danish model’. Doing so would oversimplify the Danish Social Democrats’ strategy, ignore the specific environment they operated in, and exaggerate what we can learn from a single case for social democratic parties at large. The comparative social science evidence demonstrates that while adopting tougher stances on migration may reduce the risk for a mainstream-left party of losing anti-migration votes to the far right, such benefits are typically outweighed by losses of pro-migration voters to other left-wing parties. Overall, there is strong evidence that accommodating far-right positions is not a vote winner. Instead, adopting such a strategy – especially by mainstream-left parties –tends to legitimize far-right positions and thus fuel the very threat it aims to negate.

Calling for a rightward turn would also misread the developments that resulted in the SPD’s disastrous result. If adopting more restrictive positions on migration was the way for the mainstream left to win more votes and stop the rise of the far right, the SPD-led coalition should have benefited from the toughening of border controls and deportation of Afghan nationals in the second half of2024. The opposite was the case, however.

Calling for a ‘Danish turn’ for Germany’s Social Democrats also ignores the longer malaise the party has been in. It had been polling below 20 per cent for a longtime before a series of violent attacks brought debates over migration and internal security back to the fore of German politics. Of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine less than three months after the SPD-led government had taken office was a crisis like few others in Germany’s post-war history, and pushed the government into unknown foreign policy territory. The rising energy prices that followed intensified the economic pressure the country faced. Up against these historic challenges, the Scholz government found itself confronted with repeated criticism over its fiscal conservatism, dictated by Germany’s self-imposed debt rules, and intense infighting among the coalition partners, which delayed, watered down, or prevented initiatives to tackle Germany’s public investment backlog, eroding infrastructure, and faltering economy.

Opinion polling on the issues that mattered most to voters in the 2025 election reflects this more nuanced picture. While migration was a salient topic, with 18 per cent and 15 per cent of respondents naming internal security and migration as the most important issue for their vote choice, the same share of respondents named concerns related to the economy (18 per cent for social security, 15 per cent for economic growth). Combined with Halikiopoulou and Vlandas’ recent finding that for most voters, concerns over migration are economically rather than culturally motivated, these numbers point toward the importance of economic issues in understanding the SPD’s defeat.

It is around economic issues that a renewal of the SPD needs to begin. The 2025 exit polls suggest that voters have lost trust in the SPD on issues traditionally seen as the party’s strongest policy areas. A mere 26 percent (-14) and 24 per cent (-12) of respondents considered social justice and pensions the SPD’s ‘core competencies’. Forty-six per cent of former SPD voters criticized the party for neglecting the interests of workers and employees. A mere 15 per cent (-13) of respondents named the SPD when asked which party would be able to address the most important problems in Germany. Looking to the future, the party should be particularly concerned about the age structure of its voter base. While the SPD still won more than 20 per cent of the 60 to 69-year-old vote and the over-70 votes, just 12 per cent of 18 to 34-year-oldsvoted for the Social Democrats.

So, what would a renewal look like? The SPD could take inspiration from a result that risks being overlooked amidst the attention given to the success of the far right– the impressive comeback of the Left party. Politically dead in late 2024, the party rose from 3 per cent in the polls to nearly 9 per cent in the election. In a crowded field and against the backdrop of intense public debate about migration, the Left focused on its core issues of social equality and fair rents. It ran a sophisticated social media campaign that helped the party mobilize young voters, and connected with voters using an app that allowed them to collect data on unfairly high rents. On migration, the party became the focal point for many pro-migration voters when a speech by co-leader Heidi Reichinnek went viral. In it, she condemned CDU leader Friedrich Merz’s for breaking Germany’s longstanding “firewall “by accepting AfD support in order to pass a controversial migration motion.

Does this mean that the SPD should ignore the migration issue or try to copy the Left party’s pro-migration stance? Ignoring the issue is not an option – debates over migration are unlikely to go away any time soon. But the SPD would be well advised to remember that, when trying to respond to voters’ grievances, credibility matters, and credibility is typically not found by trying to be somebody else.

Rather than turning to Denmark, the SPD might be better advised to learn from a social democratic party in a different neighbouring country. In her study of Wallonia’s Parti Socialiste, Léonie de Jonge detailed how starting from an economically left-wing platform, and then addressing grievances over migration through an economic lens, helped the PS to prevent contributing to discourse that discussed migration primarily in cultural terms, which had served to legitimize the far right in Flanders, Wallonia’s northern Belgian counterpart.

How can the SPD get there? Many mainstream parties have floundered in their efforts to move with the times and adapt their platform and organization to changing voter preferences. This has contributed to a view of mainstream parties as overly static and outdated, pushed aside by new movements and forms of political participation. However, it does not have to be that way. In my own work, I studied the drivers of successful party adaptation over the last 75 years. Parties that succeeded in moving with the times all had in common that at moments of profound societal change, they allowed for flexible approaches to connect with society and give visibility to new ideas and personnel without forgetting where their party came from. Innovation and credibility are not mutually exclusive. Both are needed to remain relevant in increasingly volatile times.

Image Credit: European Union via Creative Commons