German Chancellor Merkel presents biography of her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, 2015. Kay Nietfeld/ Press Association. All rights reserved.
Because it embodies timeless values of equality, fairness, and respectful debate, social democracy bears a dual promise: domestic social justice and European unity. The postwar struggles of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) illustrate the difficulty in translating these admirable values into political practice. In a bid to keep itself electorally relevant, the SPD adopted policies that left many Germans behind. And once the euro was introduced, the SPD pursued a narrow national interest. Germany’s dominance in eurozone governance induced other European social democratic parties to follow the SPD’s lead. Inevitably, Europe’s social democrats lost domestic support and European solidarity eroded.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the SPD’s Eduard Bernstein was in the vanguard of defining social democracy as a political movement that sought to achieve both material progress and social justice. The ground for such a political philosophy became particularly fertile after the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II. But while other European social democratic parties, notably in Sweden, created national alliances and acquired political authority, after the war the SPD struggled for nearly a quarter century to gain the German chancellorship. Briefly, between 1969 and 1982, the SPD’s Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt were chancellors.
