The New Low Lights On The Left

The right has also been good at exploiting European worries over immigration with policies that go beyond the usual tough stance on borders and crime. Under leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy, the right has pushed to develop ways to integrate poor Muslim minorities, leaving behind the left's traditional laissez-faire multiculturalism that has failed in the past.

The next major election in which all these dilemmas will be in play is Germany's, next year. The 145-year-old SPD has been in a state of crisis ever since it came to power in 1998 under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder. Faced with ever-rising mass unemployment, Schröder shocked the party by launching his "Agenda 2010" package of gradual but necessary tax relief, welfare cutbacks and labor reforms. Though Schröder's agenda helped cut unemployment from 13 percent in 2005 to 7.6 percent today, the reforms were deeply unpopular with the SPD's voters and party base, who had been raised on the party's traditional promises of an expanding welfare state—and were blindsided by the sudden switch in policy.

The result is by now familiar: a hemorrhage of SPD members and voters to the post-communist and nationalist Left Party, the collapse of the Schröder government and snap elections that brought Angela Merkel to power in 2005. The SPD's strategy until last week—a steady drift back to the left—has only accelerated its demise. While Schröder's reforms drove the SPD's traditional voters into the arms of the Left Party, the SPD's renewed leftward lurch under the ousted chairman Beck has not only alienated centrists. What's more, no matter how many new promises the SPD made, it always fell at least one step short of the Left Party's even more radical proposals. "Whenever the SPD preaches wine, the Left Party offers champagne," says Wolfgang Nowak, a former strategist in Schröder's chancellery. If a national election were held today, the Left Party would poll 14 percent, compared with the SPD's 26 percent (down from 34 percent in the 2005 election). Most likely, Merkel would remain in power.

Steinmeier seems an unlikely figure to resolve any of these dilemmas. Though his approval ratings are second only to Merkel's in Germany, that's likely due to his post—foreign ministers are always among Germans' most-beloved politicians, thanks to their high profile and low exposure to domestic-policy conflict. To many Germans, however, Steinmeier remains a cipher. He has never run for office, nor does he have a prior track record as a politician; he rose through the ranks first as Schröder's assistant, then chief of staff. Known as an efficient, middle-of-the-road apparatchik, he has a wry charm but little stage presence. Nowak says that in the four years he worked with him in the chancellery, Steinmeier was known for "cleaning up Schröder's messes" but not any policy preferences of his own. His biography couldn't be more unspectacular—born to working-class parents in a Westphalian village, trained as a lawyer, a career serving others in the bureaucracy. Friends say he only agreed to become foreign minister after SPD grandees could find no one else.

Choosing Steinmeier signals, for now, a halt in the SPD's steady drift to the left. But by no means does it suggest a renewed reform course for Germany. Steinmeier has ruled out tax cuts and signed on to a new, more left-leaning SPD election platform that calls for tighter employment regulations, new taxes on "the rich" and a partial rollback of public pension reforms. Any veering away from this platform will set off vicious internal opposition. Leaders of the SPD's left wing, like BerlinMayor Klaus Wowereit—who also rules in a coalition with the Left Party—stand ready to pounce at the first opportunity to push for a national alliance with the post-communists should Steinmeier falter. For Left Party leader Oskar Lafontaine, the nomination of a key architect of Schröder's reforms is helpful ammunition in his propaganda war against the SPD.

Steinmeier's biggest problem may be that while he and Schröder may have developed some sensible reforms, they never came up with a convincing narrative of what one might call a modern progressive reformism—a narrative of opportunity and inclusion to replace the party's traditional welfare-statist and unionist platform. That intellectual incoherence remains a problem for the SPD, and at times its speechlessness seems absurd: the reforms helped get 1.4 million Germans off the dole, yet the party is reluctant to defend its policies.

The more tangible reality for much of the SPD today seems to be its own, deeply offended redistributionist soul, says Thomas Petersen, an analyst at Germany's Allensbach Institute. While Tony Blair "accepted, however grumblingly, that there was a certain reality about the way the world works," says Petersen, the SPD, like France's Socialists or Italy's leftist parties, "never made its peace with capitalism and the market economy, nor the competition and inequalities that go with it." That's why for the SPD, national government has always ended in disaster, producing self-destructive party schisms whenever holding power confronted it with the uncomfortable reality that much of what it had promised voters was not only unaffordable, but destructive to the economy as well. For now, rallying behind Steinmeier for the campaign will paper over these conflicts. But they'll be back to the fore after Election Day, at the latest.

With Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, Tracy McNicoll in Paris and William Underhill in London

© 2008