How the SPD Lost the Future: The Party’s Crisis as a Loss of Future-imagining

Abstract

In 2019, a Der Spiegel poll asked German readers which party has the best answers to the ‘questions of the future?' Just two percent nominated the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), once Germany's party of progressive change. In this article, I argue that the party's malaise has been underpinned by a loss of future-imagining. The SPD has become disoriented ideologically, and structurally dislocated from swathes of its traditional constituency, because it has lost the capacity to imagine and pursue alternate futures. Whereas the SPD has historically been defined by the claims it made upon the future as a temporal moment belonging to the working class, conceptualised here as a ‘concrete utopia' as theorised by Ernst Bloch, the party has lost this creative impetus. A series of long-term processes, evident since the post-war era but escalating in the period since the SPD-led Red-Green coalition from 1998–2005, have reduced the horizons of the party’s ambition. Its acceptance of the post-Fordist liberalisation project is partially a product of, as well as a contributor to, this loss of future imagining.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne which hosted him as a visiting researcher during the early development of this article.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liam Byrne

Liam Byrne is Honorary Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia