While the CDU suffered a 25 percent decline among voters age 18-24, the FDP gained 7 percent among this group. The party had already experienced similar success among young people in 2002 in Saxony-Anhalt, where it returned to the Landtag with 13.3 percent and was able to form a coalition with the CDU; the SPD in Saxony-Anhalt was punished for its work in the PDS-tolerated minority government under Minister President [Reinhard] Höppner. For nearly ten years, the SPD had been able to maintain its predominance among workers. Now it became evident that the party had not succeeded in forming a lasting bond with these core voters. While it initially looked as though the SPD would be crushed between the CDU and the PDS, especially in Saxony, the Social Democrats had now fallen behind the PDS in Saxony-Anhalt as well. The hope of rendering the PDS superfluous over the long run through a rapprochement with this party – through the “Magdeburg Toleration Model,” for example, or in the form of regular coalitions, as in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, turned out to be as misguided as the second strategy, that of keeping the PDS at bay through a coalition with the CDU. At the 2004 Landtag elections in Brandenburg, the SPD, for many years the dominant political force there, suffered a drastic loss in votes from the common people. Hartz IV has become, especially for this group, the rallying point for the discontent that has already been brewing for quite some time. Over the past ten years, the SPD has lost 22.2 percent.
The cradle of the SPD was in regions that are now called new federal states. And yet the party is weaker in the East than anywhere else. It was the only one that had to start from zero after the Wende. In addition, the CDU is getting through to many classic SPD voters.
Source: Reiner Burger, “Die restlichen 70 Prozent” [“The Other 70 Percent”], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 31, 2005, p. 12.
Translation: Thomas Dunlap
print version
return to list
previous document