Europe | Charlemagne

In defence of the Volkspartei

Liberals should not cheer the decline of big-tent political parties

A FEBRILE ATMOSPHERE took hold in the humid Maximilianeum in Munich, Bavaria’s palatial state parliament, on October 14th. Activists of the Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavaria’s conservative party and the partners of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), clutched their drinks and Brez’n, and gasped as the first forecast flashed up on the screens. Their once-dominant party would apparently lose more than 10 points and fall to its lowest result since 1950. In nearby rooms their rivals cheered. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the rightist-localist Free Voters and the centre-left Greens had each taken about 200,000 votes from the CSU. One could hear the old Bavarian order creaking and cracking, like ice on an Alpine lake.

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And with it Germany’s old order. The established, centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) fell below 10%. Their electorate, like that of the CSU, is dying off. Meanwhile Mrs Merkel’s CDU/CSU alliance fell to a historic low of 26% in a national German opinion poll last week. A state election in Hesse on October 28th may deal another blow to the old Volkspartei, the big-tent, or “people’s” party. Some in Berlin wonder whether the SPD will subsequently walk out of Mrs Merkel’s “grand coalition” of CDU/CSU and SPD, bringing the whole government down.

The trend extends far beyond Germany. Across western Europe big-tent parties are in trouble. From the 1960s to the 1990s their dominance of the continent’s politics was almost unchallenged. Parties like the CDU and the SPD in Germany, the Rally for the Republic and the Socialists in France, the Christian Democrats in Italy and the Social Democrats in Sweden, used to dominate their national politics. But their voters have strayed to rightists like AfD, leftists like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “Unsubmissive France” and liberal insurgents like Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche. In next year’s European elections the centre-right and centre-left blocs may collectively fall below 50% of seats for the first time.

Germany’s Volksparteien had it coming. On October 12th the CSU leadership paraded into the party’s final election rally in the Löwenbräukeller, a Munich beer hall, to the Defiliermarsch, a brass-band classic. Over beer, roast pork and schnitzel at long communal tables, activists muttered about the influx of non-Bavarian migrants from other parts of Germany. Markus Söder affected moderation, decrying “ideologues” (ie, the Greens) on the left and “populists” (ie, the AfD) on the right. Yet after a campaign in which his party had forced public buildings to hang crosses on their walls, railed against Islam and pushed Mrs Merkel’s government to the brink of collapse over specious immigration disagreements, the Bavarian premier’s centrist rhetoric seemed woefully insincere.

Liberals might argue that one should welcome the decline of Europe’s big-tent parties. They failed to adapt to a more educated, individualistic electorate, relying instead on old institutions like churches and trade unions to rally support. Now peppier forces are taking their place. Some, it is true, are like the AfD. But arguably it is not so bad that nativist voters in many European countries now feel like they can vote for parties that represent their views.

Yet the decline of these parties poses risks. For whether on the left or the right, Volksparteien have long played a crucial role in processing social conflicts. For decades they have formed part of a system of institutions that has bound different sections of western European societies together. Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, Charles de Gaulle and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Felipe González and Mário Soares all used the electoral breadth of their big-tent parties to smooth out historical and social divides. Broad social-democrat parties built structures for co-operation between capital and labour that still underpin globally competitive economies like the Scandinavian ones. In the 1990s third-way social democrats in countries such as Denmark, Britain and Germany reformed their economies while taking people with them.

What would Franz Josef say?

Big-tent parties have been among Europe’s most powerful forces for modernisation. Franz Josef Strauss, the CSU leader from 1961 to 1988, presided over Bavaria’s transformation from one of the poorest states in Germany to one of its richest. Peter Siebenmorgen, Strauss’s biographer, says he did so by combining tradition with progress: “He had a huge curiosity about new technologies; he saw standing still as going backwards.” Large-scale migration to Bavaria did not stop Strauss from winning huge electoral majorities, notes Mr Siebenmorgen, pointing to the mass movement of Germans from Bohemia to Bavaria after the second world war. He also warns that if the likes of the CDU and the SPD die out and are not replaced, their position will be taken by the authoritarian right—pointing out that the German party with the most cross-class voter appeal is the AfD.

It is not enough to celebrate marginal gains by small pro-openness parties, or to find solace in the language of pluralism. Big, broad parties can do things other parties, however liberal, cannot. So where it is realistic, liberals should fight for control of existing big-tent parties. In the CSU, for example, the moderate Ilse Aigner—elbowed out of the way by macho types like Mr Söder—points the way to possible recovery. And new liberal forces also need to learn from the big-tent tradition. Mr Macron, for example, is now in trouble in France partly because he has made too few efforts to bind in the centre-left. Germany’s Greens talk about becoming a new centre-left Volkspartei, but to achieve that they must reconcile their openness with the views of voters less naturally comfortable about immigration.

It all comes down to a wider truth about liberalism. Just as Karl Popper wrote that tolerance depends on intolerance of intolerance; so pluralism depends on a degree of unity and cohesion. And for that, European societies need big-tent parties, or something like them. Don’t wish that tradition away.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "In defence of the Volkspartei"

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