To be fair here… They are as left as their third coalition partner allows. And that’s entirely the fault of voters, who -even with the CDU underperforming and proposing a literal clown as chancellor- couldn’t mananage to vote in a not-right majority. So why complain about not enough left policies now?
I won’t vote left and then I complain about missing left policies and decide to vote even more right isn’t a sane thought pattern but just a symptom of brain damage.
They are as left as their third coalition partner allows.
Then, in order to know how left leaning SPD and Greens are when no coalition partner is holding them back, you only need to look at the governments of Schröder/Fischer, as I already pointed out here.
Giving up on all parties based on 25 year old information is a bit pessimistic.
If there was any indication that they have changed in a meaningful way, it might be possible to look at them differently. Just there really isn’t. The fact that they willingly entered a coalition with the FDP is enough to know everything about them, because the FDP is very well known for doing exactly what they are doing right now: Redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, no matter the cost.
Going back even further in history gives more data points, especially on the SPD, which has a long tradition of coining itself as a working class party, while repeatedly selling out the working class. This pattern dates back all the way to WW1, where the SPD was very quick to expel anyone who dared to speak up against the war. After WW1, in the early years of the Weimar Republic, they cooperated with far right paramilitaries in order to “convince” striking workers to end their strikes using the very compelling argument that is firing live ammunition at them with machine guns and whatnot.
The Greens are too new to have any long standing history of being such a textbook working class party, but the few data points that exist make them look just as good. The Prime Minister of the German state of Baden Württemberg, a Green, had a little “let them eat cake” moment last year, when he advised poor people to get through the energy crisis by simply using a wash cloth instead of taking a hot shower, while boasting how he made himself less reliant on expensive fossil fuel by upgrading his own house with insulation, solar panels, and a pellet heater. In some other states, the Greens are (or have been) in a coalition with the CDU, which is also very telling.
It’s obvious bullshit to use a quarter of a century old reference… Who’s actually left from back then nearly a generation later?
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/192255/umfrage/durchschnittsalter-in-den-parteien/
Of course an AVERAGE age of 60 in the SPD shows how less is left from 25 years ago.
