Two Parties, One Crisis

This text was originally published in German in the November/December 2025 issue of Internationale Politik.

In trying to be everything to everyone, the Democratic Party in the United States and Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) risk becoming politically unanchored—no longer the natural home for their traditional bases yet unable to articulate a vision broad enough to inspire a majority. Both still claim the mantle of center-left traditions, champions of fairness, inclusion, and shared progress. But increasingly their electoral coalitions are brittle, fragmented, and defined more by subtraction than synthesis. The problem is not just strategic, it is philosophical. Both parties have mistaken the arithmetic of diversity for the architecture of solidarity, assuming that a patchwork of policy appeals can substitute for a unifying story of belonging and common economic purpose.

This confusion reflects a deeper dissonance between pluralism and cohesion, between the liberal promise of individual recognition and the democratic need for collective meaning. Both parties have embraced recognition politics, the idea that justice requires acknowledgment of group-specific identities. But recognition alone does not create solidarity. What is missing is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Taylor, and others have described as the essence of the social contract—not merely a catalog of individual rights, but a shared framework of obligations, mutual responsibility, and civic direction. Without that shared framework, even well-intentioned progressive agendas fragment into disconnected promises.

Over the last three decades, Democrats have been plagued by a messaging focus that lost connectivity with a large slice of voters, particularly those losing economic traction in the wake of the Great Recession. Where Democrats once combined social progressivism with a robust economic narrative aimed at the working class, the emphasis in the Obama era gravitated toward cultural issues such as racism, gay marriage, liberal immigration, abortion, sexual orientations, and the politics of identity. By the Trump era, the central rallying cry had shifted again, this time to defending democracy from perceived authoritarian threats.

While these issues are significant in themselves, they increasingly displaced the bread-and-butter economic concerns that many voters considered more pressing. The Biden presidency, and the dramatic way it concluded, added to existing mistrust toward institutions and their leaders, especially during the COVID-19 period when restrictions, school closures, and shifting public-health guidelines left large parts of the electorate feeling alienated.

The one area where the Democrats did manage to consolidate support was health care. Here, they could connect with a concrete and personal anxiety with which voters could immediately identify. They capitalized on that in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. But by 2024, the party’s focus had increasingly shifted toward sustaining the specific demographic groups that had been the building blocks of its electoral successes: Black, Latino, Asian, and younger voters. The core message to these groups was one of protection, that Democrats would safeguard their rights and opportunities. Yet in the process, the party lost authenticity and legitimacy among many voters who felt their own economic challenges were more urgent than the issues dominating the progressive leadership’s agenda.

Kamala Harris came to embody that problem during her campaign. The long-standing image of the Democrats as the party of the working class—think of Michael Harrington’s vision of a party rooted in labor and economic justice—has been replaced by a party that proclaims it will protect the working class but seems to treat it as an object that must aspire to the values and views of a high-earning, highly educated elite. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton could still credibly speak the language of ordinary Americans. That ability to connect, at least rhetorically, was less apparent in later Democratic leaders, whose cultural and linguistic reference points often seemed more at home in university lecture halls than in factory break rooms.

Donald Trump, by contrast, managed to disguise himself as “one of them” through his blunt speaking style and performative disdain for political correctness. He told working-class voters that it was acceptable to speak and think in their own terms, without having to conform to the sensibilities of the professional class. This populist posture helped him forge a strong connection with economically anxious voters, even when his policies often favored the wealthy.

From here, the comparison to Germany’s SPD becomes clear. The American worker living paycheck to paycheck has something in common with the SPD’s “Kumpel”—the traditional industrial worker in coal or steel—of decades past. Both groups, though diminished in size, face rising insecurity, a sense of having been left behind, and a nostalgia for a time when their work and their community felt stable and respected. Both may wish to reclaim that stability, but in the United States, many do not see Democrats fighting for them, just as in Germany, many no longer see the SPD as their champion.

The SPD shares this fate with many social democratic parties but not all. Where social democracy remains successful—in Spain, Denmark, and Norway, for example—it has consistently focused first on economic success and only secondarily on redistribution. In Denmark, the center-left also pursues a robust migration policy that is understood and broadly accepted by its citizens. That combination of economic credibility and pragmatic cultural policy has allowed these parties to maintain trust among working- and middle-class voters.

In Germany, by contrast, social democracy not only clings to old ideals of distribution. It still harbors a deep ambivalence toward capitalism more than six decades after the 1959 Bad Godesberg Program, which marked the SPD’s formal abandonment of its Marxist class-party identity in favor of a broad-based, reformist platform. As long as capitalism delivers prosperity, it is tolerated. But as soon as crises hit and difficult cuts follow, capitalism is cast as the villain.

Emotionally, it is in such moments—downturns, austerity debates, and corporate scandals—that German social democracy seems most at home. Yet attacking capitalism rarely wins elections. Those with strong socialist convictions can turn to the Left Party. Those skeptical of the SPD’s migration stance can opt for the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Those prioritizing economic growth often choose the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). For a cautious SPD, which is often reluctant to break new ground, what remains is a shrinking niche of voters who still associate the party with the old days of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Gerhard Schröder.

This nostalgia is ill-founded. At least Schmidt and Schröder governed from the center, not the left. Schmidt won majorities because he kept the more radical elements of his party in check until he was toppled by internal resistance. Schröder, early in his tenure, recognized the importance of a business-friendly policy and ultimately the need for structural reform.

In Schmidt’s and Schröder’s cases, the country’s well-being took precedence over the party’s short-term popularity. Schröder even risked, and ultimately lost, his chancellorship over the introduction of the bold “Agenda 2010” program, which included painful but necessary labor-market reforms. Many in the SPD could barely swallow these measures, which restructured unemployment benefits and liberalized hiring rules. Schröder lost politically but won lasting praise for his willingness to act in the national interest, praise that many in his own party only grudgingly acknowledge.

Since then, the paradigm has shifted. Today’s SPD leaders tend to cater to their base first, even when they know broader reforms are necessary. They go along with internal resistance whether the issue is a comprehensive overhaul of the Bundeswehr, a reform of an overly expensive social welfare system, or a fundamental reset of migration policy. The fear of being undermined by internal rivals—their respective Brutus—combines with weak poll numbers to create leaders who are politically cautious to the point of paralysis.

The Democrats face a similar dynamic. Leaders avoid alienating their core constituencies, even when that means neglecting the broader economic concerns that could unify a majority coalition. In both parties, this results in a loss of control over competing groups within the party “tent”. The common denominator among these diverse coalitions is missing in articulation, leaving the party without a clear, binding narrative.

This is the shared problem at the core. The SPD and the Democrats are operating off an outdated blueprint, one that assumes a coalition of identity- and interest-based groups can hold together without a unifying economic vision. Rebuilding that vision will take more than a charismatic spokesperson. A coherent theme would help, one that acknowledges voters in both countries can tolerate diversity in approach but still require a common, inclusive goal that feels tangible in their daily lives.

Where social democracy has weathered the storm, it has done so by focusing first on delivering economic success, building a foundation of prosperity before engaging in redistribution. Denmark’s center-left migration policy, framed in pragmatic and security-minded terms, is a reminder that cultural issues cannot be ignored or treated as secondary if they are shaping voters’ sense of national cohesion.

If the SPD and Democrats cannot recover that balance—economic credibility paired with cultural pragmatism—they risk managing nothing more than the slow erosion of their bases. The anxious, the insecure, and the left-behind will seek political homes elsewhere. Without a shared purpose anchored in tangible results, both parties will remain emblematic of the paradox of modern center-left politics. They will be rich in diversity but poor in solidarity, rhetorically inclusive but substantively adrift.