The loss of importance of the popular parties is also a reflection of a society that is becoming more differentiated. Despite the more diverse party landscape, politics can still only offer “one-size-fits-all”.
The fear is spreading. According to current surveys (INSA from September 23rd), the CDU/CSU and SPD together would only get 44% of the vote in a federal election. That would be the current low point of a decades-long trend of erosion of the formerly large popular parties. In the 1970s, they collectively received over 90% of the vote in federal elections. The loss of importance of the popular parties is palpable. And the fragmentation of the party landscape makes it more difficult to form a government. This is all the more true because the AfD, with which no other party will form a coalition, would currently receive more than 20% of the vote. In East Germany, the AfD is doing even better and is far ahead of all other parties in surveys – for example in Brandenburg with 32%.
What are the reasons?
One thing first: Measured by survey results, things were looking even worse for the SPD and CDU/CSU. For example, on the Sunday question in October 2018, the two parties together only achieved around 40% – and that in a significantly better economic environment. What can be concluded from this when the governing parties at the time received so little support, even in a solid economic situation?
Economic aspects obviously no longer play as big a role in electoral decisions as they did in the past. Economic success and approval of the popular parties have become decoupled. This means that the former US President’s dictum, “It’s the economy, stupid,” has apparently had its day.
The loss of importance of the popular parties goes hand in hand with a clearly individualized society. Values, lifestyles and world views have become more differentiated, as has the media landscape. In addition, pluralism and diversity have been “promoted” as guiding principles for social coexistence for a long time. It is almost a logical consequence that political preferences also differentiate. The trend loss of votes for the popular parties could therefore be interpreted quite unspectacularly as a political reflection of social development.
The success of the market economy may also have made a contribution: markets provide a maximum of product differentiation. There is an offer for every wish, no matter how unusual, and every taste, no matter how unusual. With digitalization, the personalization of services also became very fashionable. And in politics? There are still only a few parties. These parties and politics as a whole can only offer “one size fits all” solutions. When a federal political decision is made, all citizens generally have to deal with it equally, even if they had very different wishes (for example when it comes to the question of how much internal security or how much climate protection they would like). So people on the market are spoiled with tailor-made solutions. Politicians, on the other hand, can only offer “off-the-shelf goods”. This problem has been exacerbated in recent years by the “comeback of the state”. If politics increasingly relies on central guidelines where more individually tailored solutions to problems would be possible, disillusionment with politics can hardly come as a surprise. Politicians could have better focused on ecologically effective and economically efficient emissions trading instead of intervening deeply in citizens’ freedom of choice and their wallets with the Building Energy Act.
The discrepancy between satisfaction with the private sector and dissatisfaction with the public sector is reflected in the recently published Rheingold study. Only 34% of respondents trust the government to be able to solve existing challenges (climate change, inflation, inequality). Many people react to this by fleeing into the private sphere. A majority is no longer responsive to overarching (social/political) issues.[1]
Politics has a good chance of success if it is aligned – as best as possible – with the nature and wishes of the citizens. If the political concepts move away from the way society works for the most part, tensions threaten. The American political scientist and political consultant Mark Lilla wrote in 2017 about the political and social problems in the USA:
“Whatever vision of America and its future liberals eventually offer, it must be based on a coldly realistic view of how we live now. We go into politics with the country we have, not the country we might wish for. Reaganism endured because it did not declare war on the way most Americans were living and thinking about themselves. It fitted right in. And it has lost force because the contradiction between the dogmas and social reality is becoming all too apparent.“[2]
According to Lilla, smart politics first requires a realistic idea of what makes the country and its citizens tick. In addition, it is not a good idea to rely on political concepts that “declare war” on people’s lifestyles. Now you can never – and especially not in this day and age – lump all citizens together. But there are doubts as to whether the issues that are so vehemently debated politically and socially today are of concern to the majority of citizens. Rather, the suspicion arises that minorities of all stripes have had above-average influence on the parties and thus on politics as a whole. The political focus is moving away from the interests of the majority society towards the interests of minorities. This may be progressive and sometimes arise from honorable motives. But anyone who makes politics primarily for minorities should not be surprised if they are no longer elected by the majority in the long term. The status of the people’s party will be lost.
The question remains why parties that claim to be people’s parties even come up with the idea of orienting themselves towards the interests of small groups. Economic theory can provide an answer to this: inefficiencies often arise because politics is guided by well-organized interest groups whose concerns have very high value for the interest groups themselves. The disadvantages of this interest politics are distributed among the large, unorganized rest of the population, for whom the disadvantages are hardly noticeable or so small that an organized protest against the interest politics is hardly worthwhile. In this way, protectionist measures with which politicians protect a certain industry can be explained: The industry that reaps the profits from a protective tariff is typically well organized and therefore has considerable influence on politics – and vice versa, politics can have an impact on it Secure votes wisely. The disadvantages, on the other hand, are spread across the entire population and are so minor for individual citizens that they acknowledge them with a shrug of the shoulders – and do not punish the responsible politicians (at least for the time being).
Applied to social policy, this means that interest groups bring their goals, which have a very high – often non-financial – value to them, to politicians through good organization, aggressive marketing and activism and thus get a hearing. Politicians in turn expect votes from this or serve the particular interests to which they are ideologically close. The rest of society may share the interest group’s concern, reject it, find it absurd or be indifferent to it – but hardly anyone will rebel against it for the time being because there is little to gain for them.
The fact that the popular parties were in a moderate downward trend for a very long time and are now literally collapsing can certainly be explained: social tensions have broken out with the migration crisis. The wave of immigration has brought many topics from political and academic circles to the center of society. Almost overnight, the rules of coexistence were put to the test. Some debates about identities and the right lifestyle, which many people had previously considered marginal, suddenly took on a real dimension. The discussion shifted, especially when it came to distribution issues that were important to traditional SPD voters: distributive justice was suddenly no longer just a goal that could be achieved within state borders. Now there was also the claim to create distributive justice for humanity worldwide. No matter how justified and intellectually demanding the globally oriented approach is, the majority of voters still make sure that their own interests are represented in the best possible way when making their voting decisions – especially when their own social position is in danger.
The French sociologist Didier Eribon commented:
“Being on the left, says Gilles Deleuze… means having a perception of the horizon (seeing the world as a whole, finding the problems of the Third World more important than those of one’s own neighborhood). Not being left-wing, on the other hand, means narrowing your perception to your own country and your own street. His definition is diametrically opposed to the way my parents were left-wing. For workers and people from poor backgrounds, being on the left primarily consisted of pragmatically rejecting what one suffered from in everyday life.”[3]
With the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, the energy crisis and energy policy, drastic events with explosive social impact emerged. And on top of that, Germany – like other countries – engages in trench warfare over ideological questions, the meaning of which is not at all clear to significant sections of society. If the (former) popular parties do not succeed in orienting themselves programmatically towards average citizens when it comes to ideological issues and instead allow themselves to be driven by activists, they need not be surprised at their own loss of importance.
outlook
A real trend reversal is not expected for the time being. Forming a government is likely to remain difficult in this fragmented party landscape, as is subsequent government work. Social tensions are unlikely to decrease significantly. Moral appeals for society to reflect on the similarities probably come too late. None of this is a purely German phenomenon. Similar trends can be observed abroad. This means that elections remain a risk factor for social stability and economic development.
[1] Rheingold Institute (2023), Germany on the run from reality.
[2] Lilla, Mark (2017), The Once And Future Liberal – After Identity Politics, S.24.
[3] Eribon, Didier (2017), Return to Reims, p. 38.
Blog posts on the topic:
Norbert Berthold (2019): The popular parties are crumbling Are “left” and “right” populist parties just flashes in the pan?