The Tragedy of German Social Democracy

The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) used to be an institution. A state within a state. From 1912 to 1932, it was the largest party in the German Parliament or Reichstag. It operated an alternative public sphere through a network of institutions, from Turnvereine (gymnastics associations) and Volksbühne (worker choirs) to health clinics. 

Yet today it appears a rump. A mass withdrawn from its social base. A party without a clear ideological direction. Nor one that can easily win in federal elections or even win comfortably in state elections.

In its city-state strongholds, it regularly received more than 40% before 2000, but today it receives roughly 30% of the state election vote in Bremen and Hamburg, and even 18.4% in Berlin. In larger states, it has fared similarly: it has experienced gradual losses in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, and has been wiped out in Hesse. Nationally, the party is worse than ever, having recorded its worst federal election result in modern history in 2025, with only 16.4% of the vote. Despite entering government, its position has not improved. 

Many of the SPD’s problems can be traced to the rise of new parties and to the enmeshment of the SPD’s style, cultural liberalism, and moderation within the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) during the chancellorship of Angela Merkel. At the same time, the post-1989 consensus was disrupted by the emergence of new, alternative progressive forces, such as the Green Party and Die Linke, both of which eroded the SPD’s vote share. These explanations are real, but incomplete.

A Tale as Old as Time

The party’s chronic issues are no short-lived problems but are deeply embedded in its history and culture since its founding. Despite being the oldest party in Germany, surviving two world wars, four radically different political systems, and being forced underground twice, the party’s political culture has remained. Organisations, states and institutions inherit traumas that restrict generative action. Repression impels submission. Success incentivises passivity. Power inspires compliance. 

However, structural limitations do not determine agency. They can constrain it, though. Today, the SPD is locked in a prison of its own making, reinforced by shared trauma and political failures. 

Much of the party’s inertia stems from the SPD’s having been locked into a balancing act since its inception. By the eve of the First World War, the party had become the most popular in Germany and the most powerful socialist party in Europe. With the Erfurt Programme of 1890, the party was a genuine Marxist mass organisation, positioned as the organisational force agitating against the capitalist system. 

Still, a tension remained. 

More than a decade of criminalisation under the Anti-Socialist Laws entrenched certain habits within the party, shunning clarity and risk in favour of stability and caution to avoid state repression. 

The new programme saw socialism as a historical inevitability. This seductive narrative of progress presented the party as merely a preparatory vehicle for workers awaiting the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Action was to be shunned in favour of organisation, an option that was safer and guaranteed to increase the party’s influence. Thus, the party expressed radical theory, but its main modus operandi was reform.

This was its core tension, a revolutionary party encased in a parliamentary reality. Given the lack of political clarity and the incentives of Germany’s autocratic political system, the SPD came to focus on a single goal: growth. The party’s means became growth in membership, vote totals, readership, and so forth. The party’s main skill was winning elections. Combined with a passive narrative of progress towards socialism, the SPD sought to maintain organisational discipline, maximise electoral results, and misdirect the ire of the German state by shunning revolutionary action. 

An implicit compromise was struck: the SPD’s radical creed gave it legitimacy amongst its working-class electorate, whilst its advocacy of parliamentary reform and its collaboration with bourgeois parties kept the authorities passive. Party theorist Eduard Bernstein‘s argument for gradual reformism over revolutionary action initially provoked controversy among the rank-and-file, but soon became the unspoken norm within the organisation. All these changes did not go unnoticed; the SPD’s internal opposition, involving figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, attacked their party as too self-absorbed in its organisation, arguing that bureaucracy and complacency had replaced purposeful action. 

Each electoral victory emboldened the party’s belief in the inexorable march towards socialism. Nevertheless, even after the party achieved the largest representation in the Reichstag in 1912, the SPD was excluded from forming a government or holding any cabinet position. It was dismissed as a party by the Wilhelmine conservative establishment, which granted it only nominal power at the municipal and state levels, while it continued to advocate socialism and reforms and to agitate for Bildung –  the self-actualisation of all, regardless of class.

Nonetheless, the party was internally split between loyalty to its principles and loyalty to the Kaiserreich. Loyalty to class or loyalty to state? The party picked the latter. 

The war demonstrated how compromise can equally be seen as capitulation. The parliamentary party’s approval of war credits in August 1914 not only tore the party apart and crippled it of its revolutionary character, but also marked a rupture, one that transitioned it from an opposition party to a junior partner of the regime. Compromise was internally justified. As a defensive war against a despotic Tsarist Russia, members saw it as necessary and even instrumental in securing concessions to establish a socialist state. 

Moderate party members struck a Burgfriedenspolitik – a political truce – where all the political parties suppressed any domestic policy differences to focus their efforts on Germany’s victory in the war. As wartime hardship intensified during the Turnip Winter of 1916-17, and as workers were forcibly mobilised into the armaments industry with the Auxiliary Services Act supported by the SPD-affiliated trade unions, this belligerent faction was expelled from the party and formed the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). Three major political strikes, increasing in size and resolve, were called by members of the new party in June 1916, April 1917, and January 1918, accelerated by anger and discontent generated by the war and exacerbated by the bureaucratisation of the SPD and its trade unions within the wartime militarised state. 

Wartime Woes to Peacetime Paralysis

The 1918 Revolution came with the disintegration of the last bastion of Imperial authority: the army. Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the SPD, was, for the first time, the de facto kingmaker in a new Germany. For the first time, a workers’ party stood at the centre of power in Germany. In a pragmatic arrangement, the party again sided with the state. In return for a more comprehensive welfare state and democratisation, the party’s national executive tacitly agreed to keep the state apparatus and existing institutions as they were. 

The conservative forces of the Empire – the industrialists, the judiciary, and the military – remained in place. The large bureaucratic machinery of the Empire, full of experienced but pro-monarchical officials, successfully pressured for the addition of special protections for bureaucrats. Nationalists and moderates within the party sided with the Reichswehr and right-wing paramilitaries in crushing left-wing agitation by the Spartacists, led by former SPD members such as Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Already, the SPD’s legitimacy was in question, and now the party’s fatal choice was to preserve order using anti-democratic forces. 

The collapse of Weimar Democracy was caused as much by an attack from anti-democratic forces as by a slow process of disintegration. A process of disintegration first delivered by political violence. 

The Weimar constitution was among the most liberal and democratic documents of 20th-century Europe. Still, liberal democracy had weak roots in German society. The loose configuration of pro-Republican parties of the Catholic Zentrum, the liberal German Democratic Party and the SPD had to contend not only with each other but also with parties that refused to accept the imperfect republic as fact. The SPD became the caretaker of a state it did not control and a society it could not transform. 

The defence of the republic by pro-democratic parties was feeble at best and misguided at worst. With the organisational might of the SPD behind it, the party established the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold as a paramilitary force to defend the republic against its enemies. By the late 1920s, the groups had more than 3 million members, ranging from trade unions to veterans, and provided security for politicians and training for members. Even with a massive wing of active supporters, the same structural bargain remained; a leadership obsessed with legality, non-violence and subordination to existing institutions. 

Yet, these key institutions of the state had always been hollowed out: judges ruled against leftists, the army saw itself above civilian rule, civil servants undermined social reforms, and the police tolerated right-wing violence. The SPD’s enemies, such as the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, lacked these precautions, acting outside the rules and in complete subterfuge. 

The Great Depression and the Prewritten Eulogy of the German Republic

By the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the SPD remained the only mass party committed to the present republic. The social democrats did not actively betray the movement. Rather, by choosing the state over the movement, the party lost both. The fate of Weimar rested on this asymmetry of responsibility: a singular party committed to the republic but without the control to rule. One could govern without ever ruling. 

It was forced to govern with parties that never truly believed in democracy. Weimar Germany’s second and final president, Paul Von Hindenburg, an old-school military aristocrat, had little tolerance for parliamentary politics. Meanwhile, the grand coalition under Chancellor Brüning aggressively tightened the fiscal purse strings to curb mounting unemployment, first relying on the reluctant Social Democrats, and then by presidential decree, and later by collaboration with the Nazis. 

The SPD was backed into a corner by the left, the right, and the state. The parties of the centre, from the liberals and the Catholics, tacked further to the right. The parties of the right increased their confrontation with the state. The party to its left, the German Communist Party (KPD), was unwilling to cooperate. Germany’s Social Democrats were forced into a defensive position they did not believe they could hold, first against the state and then the Nazis. Each act of restraint was justified as necessary; each concession was framed as the last. 

The tragedy of the SPD was that the reasons for its success – legality, procedure and caution – were the same reasons for its failure. Despite being one of the best-organised parties in Europe, as the crisis came, the structure became a cage. The faith Bernstein placed in the movement itself narrowed the horizon of the possible, and with it the horizon of action. 

This dilemma has not faded with time. Today, transformative ambition is no longer assumed to be a condition of political success; unity, moderation, and compromise are treated as virtues in themselves rather than means toward an end. Structures reward restraint and punish rupture, and the outcomes they generate begin to appear natural, even inevitable. 

The tragedy of the interwar social democrats underscores this: change requires human agency. And Democracy requires principled action. The state can institutionalise, turning optimists into cold-hearted pragmatists, rendering a party immobile and leaving it open to an onslaught of barbarity. 

In a cruel twist of irony, the SPD stood alone in its final defence of the Republic. All other parties, even supposed allies of democracy, voted for the Enabling Act of 1933 formally legislating Nazi dictatorship. The SPD chairman, Otto Wels, was the only deputy to speak against the law, stating that “Freedom and life can be taken from us, but not our honour”. Yet this overdue display of honour was hopeless, in the twilight hours of a democracy way past its deadline.