Meanwhile, the richest 10 percent of the households in Germany possess nearly 60 percent of the entire net household wealth, according to a study by the trade union-linked Hans Böckler foundation, well over the average for developed countries. This is Ms. Merkel’s Achilles’ heel. Why has SPD not attacked it?

The answers is that, in order to do so, the Social Democrats would have to confront themselves with their very own shortcomings, with failures that touch the heart of their leftist self-image. Over the last two decades, largely under the auspices of the Social Democrats — either as the governing party, or as the junior party with control over domestic ministries — state-financed poverty has been replaced by privately-financed poverty.

Beginning in the 2000s under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder , the SPD were the ones who legislated many of the reforms that created today’s imbalances. They not only introduced drastic cutbacks in social welfare; the party also initiated a tax reform that lowered the top rate from 53 to 42 percent.

The maximum rate kicks in comparatively early, with an annual income of around 55,000 euros. But how fair is it, from a leftist point of view, that the same tax rate applies to someone earning 200,000 euros? Nor did the SPD seem to mind that the chief executive of Deutsche Post earns 239 times the salary of his average employee.

Then came the refugee crisis, which hit at a time when the belief in solidarity among Germans themselves had reached a low. All of a sudden, it seemed, the Social Democrats rediscovered their empathy for the underprivileged — as long as they had come from abroad. The party showed a striking lack of interest, at least rhetorically, on the social costs imposed by the arrival of over a million refugees.

Earlier this year, a food bank in Essen, in western Germany, decided to temporarily exclude foreign nationals, who were overwhelming their supplies and leaving longtime clients empty- handed. Leading Social Democrats accused the food bank volunteers of xenophobia.

Yet the SPD’s moral outrage did little to answer a complex question that confronts the entire continent: How do you distribute scant resources fairly in a framework that transgresses national boundaries?

To organize globalization in a fairer way, into one a system at least resembles the balances of the old nation state, is both a demanding and a highly demanded task for Social Democracy today. It is something that the center left should be ready to tackle. Instead, the Social Democrats turning inward, unable to answer the country’s most pressing questions at a time when Germany needs them.

Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a contributing opinion writer.

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