The lesson of the German election?

When center-left parties act like center-right parties, their voters don't turn out.

A closer look at the SPD's worst election showing since World War II reveals that the party lost the biggest share of its votes -- around 2.1 million -- because of voters who participated in 2005 but didn't bother going to the polls this time around. The polling firm Infratest dimap reached this conclusion in an analysis conducted on behalf of German public broadcaster ARD. It seems there was deep-seated bitterness among SPD supporters that what was once the party of common people and high expectations had now, together with the CDU, pushed through raising Germany's retirement age from 65 to 67. That insult came on top of a previous injury in the form of the deeply unpopular Hartz IV program of welfare reforms introduced by the SPD under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

A further 1.1 million voters apparently switched allegiance to the Left Party for the same reason, and 860,000 went to the Greens, which are both considered to belong to the left-wing camp in Germany's political landscape. Even more alarming for the SPD, however, are the losses to the opposition. The CDU won over 870,000 voters once loyal to the SPD, and even the FDP grabbed a good half million former SPD votes -- a clear sign that the Social Democrats had, as part of the grand coalition, lost a large part of its political identity. [...]

A look at young voters reveals especially clearly just how drastically the SPD has lost its appeal during four years of the grand coalition. In the past, the SPD was still sexy. Among young voters, the largest segment supported the Social Democrats at the 2005 election. The feeling used to be that if you were young and wanted to make the world better, then you believed in the SPD.

That only served to make the disappointment greater -- both disappointment among young voters at the SPD and disappointment within the SPD at the result. Only 17 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 supported the Social Democrats this time around, 21 percent less than in 2005. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, the party's standing dropped by 16 percent. Instead, young voters went for the CDU. With a 25 percent share of the vote among voters aged between 18 and 24, the Christian Democrats did the best of any party, and hardly any worse than their own results in the last election. [...]

On top of the beating the party took from young and female voters comes the withdrawal of support from another core group -- the working class. The Social Democrats lost 13 percent among blue-collar workers. Among white-collar workers, it was a whopping 16 percent.

But don't expect the Max Baucus Democrats to pay attention any time soon.