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The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) stands at a political crossroad.

In October 2000, Gregor Gysi resigned as parliamentary leader

of the PDS, and, though pledging to remain active in the party, he

will no longer hold any important party post. Gysi’s resignation was

no surprise, since he had already announced his intentions at the

PDS’s controversial Parteitag in Münster in March 2000. Nevertheless,

the reality of a “post-Gysi” PDS has only now begun to settle in.

More than any other politician in Germany—and perhaps more than

any German politician in recent memory—Gysi personified his party.

The sense of anxiousness among PDS leaders and the majority of

the party rank-and-file in the wake of Gysi’s departure is palpable.

Abstract

In the 2017 German Federal Election. The Left Party (Die Linke, or LP) saw its vote share in eastern Germany seriously erode. The main culprit behind the LP’s losses was the Alternative for Germany (AfD): 430,000 voters who cast their ballots for the LP in 2013 voted for the AfD in 2017. Why was this the case? This article suggests that the AfD in 2017 was able to attract protest voters, largely in eastern Germany, dissatisfied with the state of democracy and the political establishment in Germany who once voted for the LP. The LP and AfD have become eastern German populist competitors.

In the 2009 federal election, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) achieved the worst electoral result in its history. Immediately afterwards, the party worked to improve its public image and fine-tune its policies and electoral message, hoping that state elections in the ensuring period might provide some momentum going into the next national election. Yet, in 2013, the Social Democrats improved their result only modestly, with Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) again gaining a decisive victory. This article explores the reasons behind the SPD's failure to radically improve its electoral showing, arguing that this can best be explained by a combination of the impact of the past—namely, the legacy of its economic reforms during the Schröder era and the SPD's disadvantages coming out of the previous Grand Coalition—as well as the weakness of its 2013 chancellor candidate, Peer Steinbrück, and the popularity of Angela Merkel. The article therefore suggests that the immediate future does not look particularly bright for the SPD: any chances of gaining the chancellorship are largely out of its hand, dependent on both stumbles by its rival, the CDU/CSU, as well as the taming of a possible coalition partner, the Left Party.

Abstract

The story of Die Linke (Left Party, or lp) over the past thirty years reflects the incomplete project of politically unifying the two halves of Germany. Over the course of its history, the LP has been transformed from a desperate holdover from the communist era, to a populist representative of eastern identity in the decade after unification, and finally to a modern, all-German radical left party. Since 2015, however, the LP has found itself threatened in its eastern German heartland by the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is attempting to supplant the LP as the voice of eastern German protest.

This article analyses the development of Left Party/PDS-SPD coalitions in the eastern German Länder. It develops an explanatory framework based on attempts to understand how red-green coalitions came into being in the 1990s. The article concludes that red-red coalitions emerge when four basic criteria are fulfilled: the SPD has few other viable potential coalition options and believes it can gain in strategic terms; the ideological distance between the Left Party/PDS and SPD is small; and the personal relationships between Land-level leaders are good. The paper also argues that the heterogeneity of the Left Party/PDS is likely to ensure that Land-specific solutions to Land-specific coalition dilemmas are very likely to remain of significance in the future.

Abstract

The most recent scholarship on the Alternative for Germany (AfD) indicates that citizens primarily cast a vote for the party based on anti-immigrant or xenophobic attitudes. Nevertheless, prominent figures from the AfD suggest that many Germany citizens with immigrant backgrounds vote for it—an argument that has been picked up by the media. In this article, we investigate the most likely potential constituency of immigrants that might support the AfD: ethnic German migrants from the former Soviet Union, so-called Russian-Germans. Using the 2017 Immigrant German Election Study (imges), we find that these ethnic German migrants from the former Soviet Union indeed voted for the AfD in relatively large numbers when compared to the overall population. Furthermore, when predicting vote choice, we find that the main predictor of voting for the AfD among Russian-Germans is not political ideology but rather a simple hostility towards new refugees. Crucially, migrants with a Soviet background are more likely to vote for the AfD if they hold the position that there should be no economic or political refugees allowed into the country.

Abstract

In the 2021 German federal election, the Left Party suffered its worst electoral defeat ever. Although it hemorrhaged voters to all the parties, its losses to the Social Democrats and Greens were particularly large. In this article, we examine the reasons behind Die Linke's poor electoral performance. Although a number of factors may have played small roles, we hypothesize that the most important by far was the Left Party's failure to distinguish itself in its policy positions from its chief rivals on the center left and the left. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (cpm) and Chapel Hill Expert Survey (ches), we demonstrate the Left Party's lack of issue ownership and its distinct policy and ideological profile in 2021. Consequently, we argue that Die Linke gave voters few reasons to vote for it.

Abstract

Although the AfD is not, strictly speaking, an “eastern” party, its distinct electoral results in the two halves of Germany—underscored once again in the 2021 federal election—are something of a puzzle. In order to explain how and why the AfD performs better in eastern Germany than in western Germany, we analyze district-level results for the AfD vote, employing multiple regression models in order to find correlates with constituency vote share. We conclude that the only socio-demographic variable common to both eastern and western German AfD voters is their level of education. Significantly, we find that eastern AfD voters are both older and more economically secure than western German voters for the AfD.