Historians trying to trace the collapse of Germany’s Social Democrats would do well to look at the neighborhood of Haidhausen in central Munich.

For centuries, the area was known as the “poorhouse” of the Bavarian capital; after post-war reconstruction, it became a dilapidated workers’ quarter, described as a “district of broken glass” for its rundown condition. “About half of all apartments had no bathroom and no hot water,” the magazine Der Spiegel wrote in 1980. Even fewer had access to central heating.

Over the past few decades, however, the neighborhood has flourished — thanks in no small part to a large-scale redevelopment plan initiated by the SPD-led city government in the early 1970s. Gentrification has taken hold. Residents are younger and rents are higher than the Munich average. Trendy cafes, expensive bicycles and organic shops cluster around the district’s picturesque squares.

Given Haidhausen’s history, it’s no surprise that the Social Democrats were the dominant party in this area for decades — at least until recently. In Bavaria’s state election in October, the SPD suffered a colossal defeat in the Munich-Mitte constituency to which Haidhausen belongs, its vote share shrinking by two-thirds. Instead, the constituency’s residents flocked to the Greens, handing the former protest party a near-majority with 42.5 percent of the votes.

In an election that saw the SPD fall below 10 percent in Bavaria for the first time since 1893, Haidhausen’s shift of allegiance is the latest example of what analysts say is a broad realignment of the political landscape in Germany and in Europe.

“The traditional basis of left-wing politics, the manual or semi-skilled workers, they don’t exist anymore in Western society. At least not at the level they did before” — Jan Rovny, political scientist at Sciences Po

The transformation of Haidhausen is mirrored in neighborhoods, cities and even entire countries across the Continent. Not every corner of the European Union has become this wealthy or gentrified, but living standards have risen everywhere; the vast majority of EU residents now live in housing with a private bathroom. The traditional working class has shrunk, the proportion of well-educated, urban voters has surged — and, partly as a result, social democratic parties are crumbling.

In the wake of this change, the once stark left-right divide across socioeconomic lines that defined European politics for more than a century is crumbling. In its place, a new battleground is emerging as electorates split along lines of identity and culture.

Until now, this new divide has manifested itself most prominently in populist parties on the extreme right, like Alternative for Germany (AfD). The party’s dramatic rise is already reshaping that part of the political spectrum from the fringes to the center, as moderate conservatives try to stop hemorrhaging voters by placing greater emphasis — and in some countries shifting to the right — on identity issues like cultural heritage and immigration.

On the left, a corresponding phenomenon has been slow to emerge. But the Greens’ strong showing in Bavaria suggests a countermovement may be taking shape. In one of Germany’s most prosperous states, the Greens won 18 percent of the vote and became the second-largest party. It then achieved a similar feat in the neighboring state of Hesse, where it won 20 percent of the vote.

It remains to be seen whether the party will be able to cement its support and become the champion of Germany’s cosmopolitan-liberal camp for years to come.

In early November, the Greens overtook the rapidly deflating SPD in nationwide opinion polls. One survey put the party’s support at 24 percent, just three points below that of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. In a snap election, such a result would establish the Greens as Germany’s largest left-wing force — an enormous leap for the once marginal party. Buoyed by these recent successes, Greens from across Europe are gathering in Berlin this weekend to rev up their campaign for next May's European Parliament election.

In the minds of many German voters, the Greens have established themselves as the polar opposite of the AfD and those who adopt a similar rhetoric. “I didn’t have to think about it very long, it was crystal clear,” says Doris Langer, 45, of her decision to vote Green in the Bavarian election. The communications specialist from Munich used to think of herself as largely apolitical and has voted for various center-left and center-right parties in the past.

But when Bavaria’s ruling Christian Social Union, the CDU’s sister party, shifted rightward — particularly on migration, a subject she cares about deeply — Langer saw the Greens as her only option. “They are the only ones who have a liberal refugee policy,” she says. “Merkel’s sentence from 2015, that ‘We can do it,’ the Greens are the only ones who take it seriously.”

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The Green surge could not have happened without the collapse of the SPD. In the birthplace of social democracy, the SPD held out longer than likeminded parties in other places in Europe. But its decline reaches back decades. In a way, social democracy became a victim of its own success.

The SPD is Germany’s oldest existing party. Since taking on its current name in 1890, it has dipped below 20 percent in nationwide elections only once, in 1933; the party was banned by the new Nazi government shortly after.

After the war, the SPD became Germany’s leading left-wing force, locked in a battle with the center-right Christian Democratic Union. After abandoning its Marxist tenets in 1959, drawing up plans to reform rather than abolish capitalism, the party gradually expanded beyond its working-class roots.

Reinvented, the party attracted centrist and middle-class voters, leading to a series of SPD victories in the 1970s. Back in opposition in the 1980s and 90s, the party led regional governments in several states. The SPD governed once more between 1998 and 2005, together with the Greens. (As junior coalition partners, the Greens were weaker and less influential than now; this seven-year period was their first and so far only time in power.)

But even in the SPD’s 1970s heyday, its core base was already eroding. The structure of Germany’s economy was changing, and with it the country’s workers.

The problems the SPD was founded to solve were largely being consigned to the past. Many of its proposals have not just been adopted by parties across the political spectrum; they have largely been implemented. Over the last century, changes in education, health care and social security — reforms long advocated by social democratic parties — raised the living standards of millions of Europeans, lifting them into the middle class.

“The traditional basis of left-wing politics, the manual or semi-skilled workers, they don’t exist anymore in Western society. At least not at the level they did before,” says Jan Rovny, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris. “If they do exist, they are highly skilled and are paid close to the median wage.” (Today’s working poor, more often found in precarious service industry jobs than factories, are increasingly flocking to the far right.)

In part for this reason, the SPD pivoted toward the center in the first part of this century under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder to appeal to liberal progressives. Much like the British Labour Party under Tony Blair, Schröder’s Social Democrats enacted market-friendly policies, including drastic cuts to the welfare state.

“The SPD’s core base still hasn’t forgiven them that,” said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education in Tutzing, Bavaria.

The economic downturn of 2008 further undermined trust in the party’s ability to protect employees from market forces. Since the crisis, the SPD has been unable to win more than a quarter of votes in federal elections, forcing it first into opposition and then, from 2013, into a “grand coalition” with Merkel’s CDU that is unpopular with many of its voters.

Unhappiness with Germany’s two major parties is a leading driver in the rise of both the Greens and the AfD, analysts say. A third of SPD members opposed the party’s decision to join yet another coalition with the CDU earlier in 2018.

“The authoritarian side clearly has its champions now, whether it’s Orbán or Marine Le Pen” — Jan Rovny, political scientist at Sciences Po

Svea Windwehr, a 26-year-old student from Munich, thinks the SPD’s disappointing result in Bavaria is well deserved. An SPD voter and party member, she voted for the Greens in October. “The Greens got their ideas on digitization and infrastructure across very well,” she says. “Those are topics I care about, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough to vote for them. It was also a vote against the SPD, because of what went on in government.”

* * *

The SPD’s broad base, once an asset when elections were predominantly fought over questions of economics and social justice, has now become a vulnerability as the party struggles to adapt to the emerging cultural divide.

As socioeconomic issues have lost their salience, transnational issues and questions of culture — from migration and multiculturalism to climate change, European integration and international trade — have become subjects of fierce political and societal debate. Analysts have given many names to the opposing sides: cosmopolitanism versus communitarianism, open versus closed, liberal versus authoritarian.

“Do I see myself as a winner or loser of modernization? How do I see migration? Do I see it as a necessity to let in those seeking protection or work, do I accept a heterogeneous society? Or do I want societies to remain rather homogeneous and closed off? These are the new questions,” says Münch of the Academy for Political Education. “This conflict runs right through society, and not only in Germany.”

Across Europe, a new right has firmly established itself along the new divide. Some, like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary or the Law and Justice party in Poland, are in charge; others, like Austria’s Freedom Party or Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy, govern as part of a coalition. Still others, like far-right populists in Germany and the Netherlands, stir trouble from the opposition benches.

The new left, however, has so far struggled to find its feet. “The authoritarian side clearly has its champions now, whether it’s Orbán or Marine Le Pen,” says Rovny, the political scientist at Sciences Po. “It’s the other side that’s still being formulated. It’s not clear yet who they are in the European theater.”

What is clear: It’s not the Social Democrats, not in Germany nor elsewhere in Europe.

Social democracy’s voters may have agreed on issues like the welfare state, but many of today’s most politically loaded issues pit them against each other. The traditional working class might be skeptical of migration and wary of putting jobs at risk by shifting away from coal mining, for example. But progressive, urban supporters are more likely to favor a generous refugee policy and sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s perhaps not surprising that other parties are taking advantage of the void. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has made a play to take up the liberal banner, declaring himself Orbán and Salvini’s chief opponent. In Germany, voters have turned to the Greens. In Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, Green parties have also gained support, but in much of Europe, the movement continues to struggle.

In Germany, it remains to be seen whether the party will be able to cement its support and become the champion of Germany’s cosmopolitan-liberal camp for years to come. After all, the party has risen to such heights before, after Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.

But there’s no denying the shift in the political landscape. “I expect this to be a very abiding feature in European politics,” says Rovny. “Only exactly how it will be formulated or how it will be competed over is hard to tell.”

* * *

If the Green surge doesn’t recede, it will change the face of the German left.

The party’s program has undoubtedly developed since its early days. Sustainability remains at its core, but today’s Greens no longer focus only on the environment; the party now addresses issues ranging from health insurance to domestic security. Crucially, the party’s pragmatic wing has taken over, moving the Greens closer to the center.

Markus Busjan, 53, who runs a puppet theater in Haidhausen, says he feels the Greens have evolved along with their voters. “I grew up with the Greens,” he says. In his youth, he admired the party’s radical spirit. “But now, like me, they’re more civil and gentler. They’ve managed an artful balancing act.”

It would be a mistake, however, to see the party as simply filling the vacuum left behind by the SPD. Like the AfD — which has poached supporters not just from conservative defectors but also from the SPD’s working-class base — the Greens draw from both sides of the old divide.

In Bavaria, the Greens gained 170,000 voters from the conservative CSU and 200,000 from the SPD; in Hesse, 142,000 SPD voters switched to the Greens, alongside 108,000 CDU voters. (In both states, however, their rise did more to restructure the left than boost its seat numbers, as the AfD also gained.)

The Greens are not as broad a church as the Social Democrats used to be. Most analysts find it difficult to imagine the party winning more than 30 percent of the national vote, as the SPD did until the 2008 crisis.

Significantly, the Greens are not the party of the socially or economically disadvantaged. Green voters tend to be better educated and younger than those of the SPD; their median income is slightly higher. As per Münch’s definition, they would see themselves as “winners” of modernization. The party has also struggled to make inroads in rural areas and eastern German states.

This doesn’t mean the Greens and their supporters have no interest in social and economic fairness. Liberal-cosmopolitan voters do expect the state to take responsibility for citizens’ welfare and social security, says Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin.

“But neither workers nor the precariat [people whose employment and income are insecure] nor the lower middle class are in the Greens’ sights,” he says. “They are aware that a sixth of the German population lives below the poverty threshold, but they don’t have a strategy to change that.”

That’s why some lapsed SPD voters are reconsidering. Despite voting for the Greens in Bavaria, Svea Windwehr will likely vote for the SPD in the next federal election. “Looking at the challenges of the 21st century, there is a huge need for left-wing, social democrat policies in Germany. I don’t see the Greens filling this gap,” she says.

The consequences of the new political divide reach beyond matters of policy and legislation. It makes governing more difficult. Striking compromises on economic issues is easier than finding a middle ground on questions of identity, which tend to be all or nothing.

“As we live in a fragmented, heterogeneous society, compromise is necessary for a democracy to function,” says Uwe Jun, a political scientist at the University of Trier. “But when polarization is on the rise, that becomes harder.”

For now, the Greens are surging ahead. Although all of Germany won’t turn as green as Haidhausen, a recent Spiegel survey suggested the potential is there: Asked if they could imagine voting for the Greens, 47 percent of Germans said yes. After their party conference in mid-November, which began with a piano recital of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” German newspapers even speculated whether the party’s co-leader Robert Habeck could succeed Merkel as chancellor.

But success could prove challenging for the Greens as well. Entering a coalition in the Bundestag would test the longevity of their rise. Although the party works with both center-left and center-right parties in regional governments, it currently benefits from not having to make difficult decisions on a national level.

As part of a governing coalition, they could well face the same fate as the SPD. “We’ve seen that a new government will always be showered with criticism and its popularity falls fast,” says Jun. “The Greens would run the same risk.”

Germany’s cosmopolitan left could find itself looking for a champion once again.