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Why did the SPD fall so far behind?

The SPD has abolished itself. Basically, that Schröder character, who has recently risen to international notoriety for being in Putin's pocket, reinvented the SPD as a centrist party (modeled after Tony Blair's "New Labour") in the early 2000s. They subsequently implemented the harshest social cutbacks in German post-WW2 history. This has led to them losing their credibility as a social democrat party, and they haven't really changed since. That they scored relatively well in the last federal election was mostly due to the CDU picking Armin Laschet, who can best be described as a sad joke, as their frontrunner.

I think it's due to several factors.

• Now that CDU is in opposition they spew out even more right wing rethoric in the hopes of gaining voters from AfD. But that also legitimises that view.
• FDP is severely hindering the government, thus anything good it can do has less impact.
• Now that the government is trying to rectify some of the problems CDU (and SPD with them) caused when they were in the government those problems become more apparent. Angela Merkel was great at deflecting all criticism and progress.
• SPD hasn't really been a social party for decades. That scares people away that actually want a social party. Die Linke isn't feasible either, they're deep in Putin's arse and hate immigrants as much as the right.

Why did the SPD fall so far behind?

They went so hard for the center that they came out on the neoliberal and now even right side in the end, which made them loose a big chunk of their liberal core voters. One recent quote of Olaf Scholz was "We have to deport on a large scale again".

What’s going on in Germany that’s causing this neo Nazi rise?

Similar stuff as in the US. Years of normalizing hate speech and Xenophobia by the right wing did a lot of damage to public discourse. Covid measures caused an explosive growth of conspiracy theories and anti democratic ideology.

Has the CDU gotten more extreme the last few decades?

Definitely, I hate the CDU but I have to say that Angela Merkel was quite the humanist compared to Friedrich Merz, who is a right wing populist and an agent of high finance, just like Alice Weidel from AfD.

Not over the last decade. They looked at the results of the 2021 election, watched as two smaller parties (FDP and Greens) first negotiated between themselves to then look which one of the bigger parties would be the better coalition partner and panicked as they obviously don't have actual policies other than "let's do nothing and everything should stay as it is". Then they did an instant sharp turn to right-wing populism.

Throughout the last decades, both the SPD under Schröder and the CDU under Merkel pursued a strategy of centrism to win over moderate voters from the other party. In the long run, the CDU was more successful with this strategy, mostly because leftwing voters were more willing to abandon the SPD for a smaller party (Die Linke/The Left) than rightwing voters the CDU. With the rise of the AfD though, this has changed somewhat.

The primary reason, in my opinion, why the SPD did relatively well in the last election (winning the plurality of votes, while being the weakest ever winner of the plurality) was that the CDU considered the Greens to be their primary challenger, focusing their attacks on them while sparing the SPD. As the Greens were in opposition while the SPD was in government alongside the CDU, there wasn't really any easy attack strategy the CDU could have pursued against both simultaneously.

Now though, the SPD and Greens are part of the same government, a government that has to deal with a lot of crises at once while dealing with infighting. This gives the CDU an easy avenue of attack. At the time, the CDU seems to also pursue a strategy of being more conservative to win back voters from the AfD.

Current polling could either be interpreted as the CDU's strategy succeeding, as the CDU leads while SPD and Greens trail far behind, or as a failure, as the AfD doesn't appear to lose any support. The main question is: where would the CDU stand if it had continued with its centrist strategy?

We see a few trends here:

First of all the CDU moved more to the center under Merkel, which squished the SPD. Now it is going back into full right wing, overshooting their previous positions.

The current government faces multiple crisis, that are excarberated by the lack of investment and political progress under Merkel, who governed succesfully on a basis of "go back to sleep, everything is fine" while infrastructure crumbled, energy dependence on Russia increased and the rising far right extremism was conveniently ignored.

Now all these crisis are used by the Nazis from the AfD and outside of parliament to attack the government for failing to make the issues go away in an instant. With that the CDU is joining force with the AfD, moving from conservative positions to far right populism and starting to work together with the AfD on local and state level.

Then the current government from the SPD - social democrats, green party and FDP - liberal party is strongly divided. The Green party tries to bring on necessary reforms that werent done in the past 16 years under Merkel. The FDP attacks them heavily and acts like an opposition inside the government, often violating agreements and changing their minds last minute. The SPD doesnt really have political positions anymore. They just want to have some power and government positions. So Scholz as a chancellor is sitting back, hiding from media and publicity in general. He then just follows who won the current issue between Green party and FDP. This tactic is failing of course because in times of crisis people want a leader that is present and they want a government that seems united.

Finally in Germany there is a lot of far right media, including the Axel Springer publisher, the one where the director of Bild Zeitung had to resign because of sexual misconduct at work and their head Döpfner, is claiming eastern Germans to either be communists or nazis, actively demand his newspapers to strengthen certain parties and last but not least claiming all other media to be like in former eastern Germany. But instead of taking position against such claims he was leader of the journalist association and most newspapers happily follow into the disinformation campaigns started by Springer against the current government.

So overall you have the same situation as in the 20s, where crisis meets a weak government and opportunistic conservative forces in politics and society, that believe they could use the Nazis to gain power and foolishly believe they could control them in the end.

The SPD is doing many thing against people especially their base voters plus hiding in the cirrent government. I guess, it's no longer clearly what the SPD stands for. Their loss in votes begann with important but not well done reforms in the early 2000s. The CDU has gotten more right but the Problem is that the far right AFD collects all votes from frustrated people who thinks worlds end is better than the current state. So there are people on the far right side coming from CDU and CSU as well as FDP but also from the left parties.

It is still easyer to blame welfare recipients, foreign people and so one instead of using the brain.