Germany’s Party of Democratic Socialism struggling to stay alive

Abstract

After years of counterintuitive success at the ballot box, the post-communist PDS (the successor to East Germany's Socialist Unity Party, SED) recently discovered just how harsh electoral politics can be. The failure to overcome the national 5% hurdle in 2002 was an unexpected, yet. as will be shown here – largely self-inflicted, blow for the party. It managed to garner just 4% of the vote (16.8% in the eastern part of the country; 1.1% in the West) and, as Table 1 shows, its electoral losses in the new,e1>Länder were devastating. In total, the party obtained under two million votes (1,915,797). This was a reduction of some 600,000 from four years earlier and it translated into 35 fewer seats in the Bundestag.