Disintegration of the Social Democratic Party in Germany

Coalition talks are still underway in Germany. Judging from a story in The Guardian by Philip Oltermann, "German parties hope to reach coalition deal this week," Social Democratic Party leader Martin Schulz is pushing hard for the type of policies it is hard to imagine Merkel's CDU can accept:

The SPD leader, Martin Schulz, announced on Monday that the two sides had also reached an agreement on the European chapter of the coalition agreement that amounted to “an urgently needed signal for a fresh start for Europe”.

The agreement would commit the next German government to “more investments, an investment budget for the eurozone, and an end to the austerity mantra”, as well as “fair taxation” of internet giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, Schulz said via an information service for SPD party members.

Schulz has to push hard because the SPD is in real trouble. Alternative for Germany (AfD) is only a few points shy of overtaking the SPD as the second-largest party in Germany behind CDU. Katrin Bennhold explores the abandonment of the SPD for AfD by rank'n'file union members in traditional industrial strongholds.

Bennhold's story, "Workers of Germany, Unite: The New Siren Call of the Far Right," is worth reading for the insight it provides into the sway of Trump among the U.S. white working class.

Elites throughout the West are loyally wedded to neoliberalism. A particularly acute articulation of this commitment could be found over the weekend in Anna Sauerbrey's "How Millennials Are Changing German Politics":

Real politics always consists of bullet points. You want to lift up the lower middle classes? You have to pass tax relief, restructure social security contributions, bolster the education budget — which is what the next grand coalition will vow to do, if the negotiations are successful.

The challenge for German politicians, moving forward, will be to come up with a narrative big enough to create a sense of direction, of being based on values more fundamental than raising the gross domestic product a few percentage points, but avoiding the sort of utopian visions that German voters rightly distrust.

If they succeed, they could set free a new era of political energy. If they fail, we could see a dark turn toward the sort of fractured, incoherent politics haunting the rest of the world, full of holes that the far right can move through. There’s a trap, however. In raging against the slow and boring politics of compromise, the members of the new generation are joining the very populist chant they are setting out to defeat.

In other words, more compromise, cuts to social programs, no utopias -- more of the same. That's the mantra of the neoliberals. And by doing more of the same we will magically "set free a new era of political energy." This is derangement, plain and simple.

The safest bet in any book is the bet that the traditional parties of the mainstream left in the West will continue to disintegrate.