SOCIALISM SUCKS: How social democracy lost its way: a report from Germany.

Last year’s defeat came as a shock because of the magnitude of the drop in votes, but it was the continuation of a decades-long erosion of support. With one exception, the party has lost votes at every general election going back 20 years. Since 1998, it has shed half its electorate, and there is no sign the decline has stopped. Some recent polls show the party now being eclipsed not just by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats but also by the Greens and the far-right Alternative for Germany.

On Sunday, the party suffered another humiliating defeat in a regional election in Bavaria, where it slumped to just 9.7 per cent of the vote. All of this raises a profound question: can Europe’s oldest social democratic party survive? The answer has implications that resonate far beyond Berlin.

It’s hard to survive as a party that sets itself against the nation it wants to govern. Yet socialist “transformations” increasingly involve just that.

Plus: “The 2015 refugee crisis and the political convulsions that followed are a case in point. The SPD backed Merkel’s decision to accept more than a million refugees from crisis countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the evident risk of a political backlash from voters. The decision was right in principle, Schäfer believes, but was poorly explained.”

When lefty policies fail, it’s always because they were “poorly explained,” never because they were horrible, destructive ideas that any reasonable person would have rejected out of hand.