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13 points

or in case of the SPD you just had to look at most of the Merkel governments

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9 points
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That, too, but if you point at those, people will argue that the SPD couldn’t be more social due to being caught as the smaller partner in a coalition with the CDU.

If you really want to point out the full scale of antisocial policy done by SPD and Greens, you have to point at the governments Schröder/Fischer, because for those, there is no CDU fig leaf to hide behind. And there is plenty to find there, a few highlights for those who don’t want to be bothered with looking it up:

  • “liberalisation” of the labour market (allowing temporary employment schemes that spawned an entire, previously illegal low wages sector and reduced the influence of unions)
  • “reforms” of the social security system with severe cutbacks to unemployment benefits, forcing lots of people into the newly created low wage sector. On top of that, subsidies to the low wage sector through the employment office (if your employer doesn’t pay you enough to make a living, you can’t quit your job without losing access to benefits, but you’re allowed to claim extra money from the employment office)
  • “reforms” of the pension system, which reduced the pension levels, increased the pension age, and introduced subsidies to private pension schemes provided by insurance companies, which by now all have been identified as scams where you pay way more than you get out.
  • “liberalisation” of the financial sector, which made previously illegal hedge funds legal, which then promptly created a bunch of financial and subsequent economic crises with their unhinged speculation.
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7 points

God. I hate Tony Blair’s influence on Schröder back then. Pretty much everything you wrote came originally from Blair…

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9 points
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That’s no coincidence. Schröder modeled his transformation of the SPD into a neoliberal centrist party after Blair’s “New Labour”.

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