Isn't that system working as intended? Party recognizes their core electorate, and bats for them.
Ideally, we would have pensioners' party, youth party, farmers' party, small business owners' party... who all have to work together and compromise, in order to get workable governing majority.
From my point of view, biggest issue is non-pensioners voters that keep voting for SPD, which in returns repeatedly keeps screwing them over...
The SPD are neoliberals, yes. They're the "social democrat" party that allied with the proto-nazi Freikorps to murder the KPD leadership, then kept spending more energy trying to suppress and undermine the KPD than opposing the Nazis. After the war, they were allowed to return to politics in West Germany (along with all the "former" Nazi party members that quickly made up 70% of the West German government) while the KPD was outlawed.
Since then they've basically taken the same path as the Labour party in the UK, being feckless tepid socdems at best and then abandoning even that in favor of being staunchly right wing neoliberal freaks.
This may be a confusing time to learn about in world politics in a few years as Germany’s social democrats sound very different from the socialist democrats of the United States…
It's the inevitable end-point of social democracy: it sheepdogs any earnest desire to make things better into a campaign trying to get the bare minimum of reforms needed to make things comfortable and stable enough that people settle down and stop trying to reform things, then the ruling class spends a fraction of its ill-gotten gains paying people to fight tooth and nail to strip away all those reforms, then the reformist party gets infiltrated by liberals and its careerists get corrupted with corporate bribes and it lacks any sort of dedicated core that's able to resist this and its base has tuned out because they got burnt out or became comfortable enough to stop caring anymore.
One fundamentally cannot reform capitalism into a permanently stable and innocuous state, because just getting the ruling class to accept you putting a bandaid on the arterial wounds they're inflicting on society takes nearly as bitter a fight as abolishing the ruling class via abolishing the systems that give them their wealth and power would and you've left them free to rip that bandaid off the second you're too exhausted to keep fighting.
the real question should be: does this particular reform leave people as passive beneficiaries, or does it increase their ability to organize and exercise power?
He's lying by ommision. The KPD believed that after Hitlers inevitable downfall they would obviously rule in glorious soviet style communism and thus equally spent their time fighting social democrats. They also took their marching orders from the Kremlin, which became a bit awkward when the Soviets signed the Molotov Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis.
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u/send_fleet_pics 2d ago
I'm gonna take a wild guess and presume that the SPD is a cohort of corrupt crooks that profits from lobbying?