Where is the middle? Considering the socio-political centre in Germany

ABSTRACT

Where is the political middle? This article revisits the concept in an era of populisms, radicals, extremists, niche parties, social movements, swinging voters, non-voters, and a shrinking ‘mainstream’. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is a pertinent case because of its history as an archetypal consensus democracy. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were parameters shaping the ‘middle’. Plurality and fluctuation in the electorate challenges these coordinates and change in the party system surpassed previous ‘transformations’. Three crises correlated with fragmentation and upheaval. A fourth correlates with a shift, at least temporarily, back to a traditional ‘centre’ party. The article draws on election and polling data, surveys, party programmes, media sources, and a multidisciplinary literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Political middle
• Germany
• party system
• electorate
• crises
• populism

Acknowledgements

Steve Wood thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Goethe-Universität-Frankfurt, and Prof. Dr. Reinhard Wolf, for valuable assistance.

Notes

1 Translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

2 A word with no single precise translation in English. Its facets include civil, bourgeois, middle class.

3 Another branch advocates for anarchism though still regards itself as (far) ‘left’.

4 Wonka (2016, p. 131) mentions an ‘ideological centre’. An explanatory footnote draws on the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, aligned with the Manifesto Project, which proposes a linear scale of 0 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right). The SPD is rated 4.1 and the CDU 5.7, roughly equidistant from the absolute centre represented as 5. The FDP, at 7.3, is to the right of the CSU, at 6.5.

5 The ‘Party of Non-Voters’ was terminated in 2017. It will live on in Internet-form (Partei der Nichtwähler, 2017).

6 For a historical comparison on non-voters in Germany, see Lipset (1960, pp. 149–150).

7 The ‘New Middle’ (Neue Mitte) is preparing to contest the 2021 federal election. See https://neuemitte.org/.