Squint your eyes and everything looks as it should in B-Trieb, a corner pub in Germany’s western industrial city of Dortmund.
The bar up front is buzzing with the after work crowd while, around a large wooden table in the back room, nine members of the local Social Democratic Party drink beer and swap stories. This is their last monthly “Stammtisch” get-together before Sunday’s federal election.
The main topic is of how the positive reaction they encounter on their door-to-door canvass contrasts with polls predicting an overall SPD support of15 per cent next Sunday – which would be the worst result in the party’s 162-year history. What will we do, these Dortmund party soldiers want to know, if it all goes wrong?
“It’s never been more difficult to assess the mood and whether people will even go to vote, many people are just at a loss,” says Jonathan, a 35-year-old local SPD organiser.
For weeks the media coverage in the campaign has focused on fears over immigration after a succession of violent attacks involving failed asylum seekers. For long-time SPD member Sigrid (69), this debate ignores the concerns she hears from her circle of friends.
“My neighbours don’t care about migration, they care about being able to afford their rent, their shopping,” says Sigrid, who joined the party in 1972, the glory days of legendary SPD leader Willy Brandt, but admits she has “a bad feeling about this election”.
She’s not the only one. Younger members at the table, such as 34-year-old Verena, say the SPD is struggling to own the promises it delivered on – such as a €12 minimum wage or stabilised pensions.
“We’ve never had so many classic SPD themes in an election,” says Verena, “yet we’ve never had it harder to actually get through to people.”
For 29-year-old Nastasja, part of the problem is how negative campaigning about “lazy welfare recipients” has left the SPD on the back foot over welfare reform, so-called “Bürgergeld”.
This was one of the party’s main achievements in office: a simplified, more generous welfare system that also ended decades of inner-SPD tensions dating back to the days of Gerhard Schröder.
Opening the pot to Ukrainians and others who never paid in, however, has proved controversial.
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Two years ago the tabloid Bild, using incorrect calculations, warned that “working is no longer worthwhile” for low earners given the monthly welfare payment of €563, excluding rental and other allowances.
“Somehow Bürgergeld has been spun into a negative story that has really taken off, so the working class and less well-off are being played off against each other,” says Nastasja in Dortmund’s B-trieb bar. “No one is picking up on the need for wealth or inheritance taxes.”
Germany finds itself, once more, in the age-old battles of class and wealth redistribution.
For decades Dortmund was the driver of the SPD’s heartland in the western Ruhr industrial region, where new factory employees were directed first to the nearby union office and then to the SPD branch.
In Dortmund, a local joke says, you could paint a broomstick in bright SPD red and it would get elected. In 1964 the local party polled 64 per cent in local elections. As recently as the 1990s local Bundestag candidates polled more than 50 per cent. But a shift away from industrial production in previous decades has been expedited by the recent surge in energy prices.
Major regional employers, such as steel giant ThyssenKrupp, are planning huge job cuts – or a production shift to plants abroad. That has all loosened ties to the SPD and five million voters across the industrial Ruhr area. In last year’s EU elections, the SPD attracted just 17 per cent support, down from 31 per cent in the 2021 federal poll.
Dortmund SPD candidate Jens Peick topped the poll in 2021 with 33 per cent – above the SPD state average – and was elected to the Bundestag. After a busy day of campaigning he has set up his stand outside a popular local bar, distributing shots and pamphlets to evening revellers.
Peick admits his voters are not interested in the complexities and crises the SPD has had to grapple with in power – in particular inflation and other effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“People just say to us, ‘Oh you’re the ones who’ve made everything more expensive’,” says the 43 year-old trade unionist and SPD leftist.
Is he worried about frustrated SPD voters, as has happened elsewhere in the region, drifting off to the far-right Alternative for Germany? “I see a real hardening in many people since the last election [in 2021], he says. “They know what is right and they are not ready to listen, not interested in respecting others.”
Dortmund police chief Gregor Lange sees a similar pattern, with shifts in public behaviour since the pandemic difficult to reverse. Dortmund has seen a surge in crime, in particular violent street battles among gangs in areas of the city where one in three is not a German citizen.
“The inhibition thresholds have fallen,” says Lange, presenting figures showing a 12 per cent rise in violent crime. Conflicts no longer end in shouting matches or fist fights, he says, “but with knives and even firearms”.
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Back in Dortmund’s B-Trieb, local SPD organisers are powerless to tackle violent criminals. Their focus is on reaching people who claim to be ignored by politicians, but who are not interested in getting involved or informing themselves about politics.
Guido, a 58-year-old jazz musician and SPD member, jokes that post-pandemic Germany is turning into a “free jazz combo with everyone for themselves – and not in a good way”.
“Sometimes it is better to play but at other times it’s better to listen to others,” he said.
Ask around Germany’s political parties and all report a growing resistance among voters to listen and engage. SPD organisers fear particularly grave consequences for their traditional electorate as the world faces into a new labour struggle over AI and increasingly precarious employment.
Local official Vincent (33) remains optimistic. Many younger Germans, sensing a major political earthquake ahead, are joining political parties such as the SPD. The challenge in the final days ahead of Sunday, Vincent admits, is to convince voters to sign up.
The SPD was founded to help workers improve their lives through political action and involvement, Jonathan reminds those around the table, but he fears many of his peers have never “learned democracy”.
“They are often passive people who take things for granted, are not capable of democratic discourse or compromise and often have only their own interests in the foreground,” he says.
As the evening wears on, and the beers keep coming, even Jonathan concedes that the SPD’s problems are, in part, home-made. Outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz, a stiff Hamburg lawyer with a reputation for arrogance, is not the charismatic gladhandler they would wish for here in Dortmund.
“Our challenge is not just our personnel,” admits Jonathan, “but our struggle to communicate a vision of the future.”
Nastasja intervenes quickly: “But we are working on that every day.” Just six days left.
