Is it a smart strategy of the SPD choosing a member of Merkel's administration?

[palandio]

On these notes, can someone tell me why Linke is doing so poorly while it is Grüne the one that is gaining from the SPD collapse?

If you are one of the people abandoning the "SPD sellouts who always go with CDU" it makes no sense to vote Grüne, who will just as easily do coalitions with CDU?*

Is Linke still suffering from DDR stigma? Fear of Linke being a pariah party like AfD? Or is it something else?

*: Or actually even more so, one of my impressions from green parties in Europe is that they tend to "sell out" even easier than the socdem parties

The SPD has lost voters for all kinds of reasons into every immagineable direction.

I would think that voters that recently abandonned the SPD for the Greens don't really have a big problem with the politics of the SPD, Greens or moderate parts of the CDU. It's just that being a potential challenger to CDU/CSU was an electoral asset in itself and without that you can take the younger, hipper feel-good option that is also the natural choice if you care about climate change and similar issues.

Die Linke in its current outlook is just not what many who are discontent with the SPD and the government are looking for. Die Linke might try to fight for a just world and a better life for everyone. But many potential voters just don't think that Die Linke cares about the same things they care about. Plus due to Germany's Cold War history there seems to be a natural ceiling for parties that are (rightfully or not) associated with the radical left.

[palandio]

On these notes, can someone tell me why Linke is doing so poorly while it is Grüne the one that is gaining from the SPD collapse?

If you are one of the people abandoning the "SPD sellouts who always go with CDU" it makes no sense to vote Grüne, who will just as easily do coalitions with CDU?*

Is Linke still suffering from DDR stigma? Fear of Linke being a pariah party like AfD? Or is it something else?

*: Or actually even more so, one of my impressions from green parties in Europe is that they tend to "sell out" even easier than the socdem parties

Because the Greens and die Linke are completely different parties. Die Linke is unambiguously a left-wing, socialist party, whereas it is doubtful whether the Greens are even to the left of the SPD any more; they are essentially a moderate social liberal party. Their voter bases are completely different; the most fundamental difference is that die Linke are an East-based party, whereas the Greens’ strongholds are in the West, and more broadly the Greens’ coalition is significantly more upscale and educated. Whereas die Linke are probably competing with the AfD for a good amount of votes, the Greens have been able to pick off upper middle class professionals from the CDU. I would say that the Greens now have the bulk of younger centre-left voters, and it is mostly older people sticking with the SPD.

Die Linke has been changing though for the last decade. The party and its electoral base are becoming younger, more Western and more educated. The problem is that the new base of very progressive voters is growing but limited and that competition by smaller parties like DIE PARTEI, Pirates, Volt, Democracy in Movement, Animal Welfare, etc. can lead to electoral desasters like the last European Elections.

[palandio]

[...]
Created this little map to visualize the performance of the Left (respectively PDS/WASG alliance) in 2005 and 2017. The national result (8.7 and 9.2 % respectively) was almost identical, but you can clearly see how the Left lost ground in the East (+Saarland with the vanishing Lafontaine factor) while simultaneously gaining support in the West.

Which reminds me of the following map I created in 2013:


Basically 2009 was peak "populist voter coalition" for the Left. E.g. the Left got results of 17% in several villages in the Bavarian Forest and other Western German places where it was below 5% before and afterwards.

2013 meant a reversal to the mean in many of these places. On the other hand you can already see that the Left was holding up much better with the urban alternative crowd and with educated voters. The East was still relatively stable.

2017 brought severe losses in most of the East (not so much in the hip parts of big cities and university cities). On the other hand the Left gained in the West, not only in the cities but also to some degree in areas where it had been very weak before, the only exception being the poorest parts of the Ruhr area where the Left actually suffered modest losses.