Social Democratic Party of Germany

Social Democratic Party of Germany Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
General Secretary	Kevin Kühnert
Co-leaders	Saskia Esken Lars Klingbeil
Founded	27 May 1875
Merger of	ADAV SDAP
Newspaper	Vorwärts
Student wing	Juso-Hochschulgruppen
Youth wing	Young Socialists in the SPD
Women's wing	Association of Social Democratic Women
LGBT+ wing	SPDqueer
Political orientation	Social democracy Neoliberalism Imperialism

The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), originally called the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, is a social democratic party in Germany that was originally a Marxist party but over time slipped into revisionism and opportunism before eventually abandoning Marxism officially. It currently holds the most seats in the Bundestag as a part of the ruling coalition and is the party of the current German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

History

Founding

The SPD originated in a congress in Eisenach occurring in 1869 where the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP) was formed from a merger of the Assembly of German Worker Associations (VDAV) and leftists in the General German Workers' Association (ADAV). The SDAP leaders, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, sought a counter-weight to the Lassallean ADAV that supported Otto von Bismarck's policy of unifying Germany "from above" relying on Prussian militarism and instead followed the lead of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in struggling for the revolutionary unification of Germany "from below."

Following Bismarck's unification of Germany a congress was held at Gotha in 1875 at which the SDAP merged with VDAV to form the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany which would be renamed to the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1890. The party program adopted at the congress, the Gotha Program, contained many concessions to the idealist Lassalleans, particularly concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat, which would lead Marx and Engels to criticise the program in their Critique of the Gotha Program.

Socialist history

The influence of the SPD grew rapidly, gaining roughly 500,000 votes in the Reichstag 1877 elections. Following this success, in 1878 the bourgeois-junker government imposed anti-socialist laws, which caused the SPD to be banned until 1890, starting what would later be called the "hectic period" by Vladimir Lenin. During this period the party newspaper, Vorwärts, was also made illegal so it was replaced with the Der Sozialdemokrat untilVorwärts was later unbanned along with the SPD.

Marx and Engels aided the SPD greatly and thanks to them the party successfully overcame the opportunism of Karl Höchberg as well as the incorrect tracts of Johann Most and Wilhelm Hasselmann. During this time period the SPD was one of the foremost parties in leading the international proletariat in the class struggle and took an active role in establishing the Second International in 1889. When the party was unbanned in 1890 it gained 35 seats in the Reichstag, and in 1898 they only grew gaining a total of 56 seats, representing a quarter of all votes.

Engels continued to work with the party as it grew in influence, aiding the party leaders in countering rightist elements such as Georg von Vollmar, as well as anarchist groups. In 1891 a new congress was held in which the party met at Erfurt and agreed the Erfurt Programme, an improvement over the Gotha Programme given its more radical content. However, the programme still did not demand a dictatorship of the proletariat and this as well as other opportunist concessions led Engels to critique the program in A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891.

Turn to opportunism

As the 20th century began, the party experienced an upsurge in revisionism and opportunism brought on primarily by Eduard Bernstein. At this time the party has three main currents, the opportunists including Bernstein and Carl Legien, the centrists, and the radicals led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Modern history

From 1998 to 2005 the SPD were the ruling party in coalition with the Greens under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who passed unpopular neoliberal reforms. Their decline in popularity led to them becoming the junior partner in a coalition with Angela Merkel's right wing Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and continued its decline. For the next decade the SPD became indistinguishable from the conservative parties losing different respective sections of voters to Die Linke, the Greens and Alternative for Germany (AfD).

After crashing to just 15% of the vote in the 2019 European Parliament elections, leader Andrea Nahles resigned and not long after the party made some minor reforms changing from a one-person leader to a two-person leader and allowing election of leaders by the party membership. In the ensuing election the neoliberal Olaf Scholz and Klara Geywitz ran against social democrats Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, with the social democrats winning with 53% of the vote. Although the party made some moves back to social democracy, the party still maintains a strong neoliberal presence with Olaf Scholz becoming Chancellor in 2021 at the head of a coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).