The Disappearance of the Centre Parties

9 March 2026

On 9 March 2026, the FDP lost the state election in Baden-Württemberg. It was no surprise — and yet a signal flare. With this defeat, the party has been ejected from ten parliaments at federal and state level. More will follow in Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. A party that participated in nearly every federal government since the war has ceased to exist politically.

A few weeks earlier, on 23 February 2025, the FDP had received 4.3 percent in the federal election — 0.5 points below 2013, a new all-time low. Expelled from the Bundestag, where it had held 91 seats in 2021. Christian Lindner, twelve years as party chairman, announced his departure. His successor Christian Dürr promised a "process of modernisation." That is the sound of a eulogist speaking about the future at a funeral.

At the same election, the SPD received 16.4 percent — the worst result in its history in the Federal Republic. In Thuringia it had reached 6.1 percent in 2024; in Saxony even less. The current polling puts it at around 15 percent nationwide. A party that once governed with 45 percent, whose membership exceeded one million in the 1970s, has shrunk to a third-tier political force.

The Numbers Are Not a Coincidence

The collapse of the centre is not a snapshot. It is the result of a process running for decades — one that no party can reverse through personnel changes or election manifestos.

The SPD had around 1,022,000 members in 1976 — more than all other parties combined. By the end of 2024, that number had fallen to 358,000. More than sixty percent of the membership has vanished over fifty years. Of those remaining, nearly half did not participate in the vote on the 2025 coalition agreement — not out of protest, but because the party is no longer a lived reality for them.

The FDP was never a mass party. But it was the institutional corrective — sometimes liberal-conservative, sometimes pro-business, always the party that tipped the balance. That role no longer functions when there is no stable bourgeois centre to need and sustain such a corrective.

What both parties share: they have lost their original social base. The SPD was the party of organised labour — a milieu that no longer exists in that form. The FDP was the party of the self-employed middle class, the liberal professionals, the educated bourgeoisie — a milieu that has reorganised itself, drifting partly to the CDU, partly into non-voter territory.

What "Centre" Meant — and What Remains

The term "political centre" is misleading. It implies a geographical position on a left-right spectrum. That was never its real content.

What the centre parties actually represented was a particular orientation towards political order: pragmatic, capable of compromise, loyal to institutions, open to reform without revolutionary impulse. This orientation was neither left nor right — it was the foundation of parliamentary democracy in its postwar form. The Volksparteien were its carriers; the smaller parties its hinge.

That consensus is disintegrating. Not because people have become worse. But because the institutions that produced this consensus — trade unions, churches, civic associations, industrial workplaces with stable workforces — are themselves eroding. Without these social carriers, there is no natural resonance for centre parties.

"The party is the vessel of belonging. When the vessel disintegrates, belonging does not disappear — it searches for new forms."

What remains are two poles: on one side, the party of continuity (CDU/CSU, and in part the AfD as protest expression against that very continuity); on the other, parties of protest and change. The centre — as lived compromise between the two — has no institutional home.

The SPD: From Milieu to Administrative Party

The SPD survived three transformations that should by rights have killed it: revisionism around 1900, the rupture of 1914, the accommodation with capitalism in the 1950s (Bad Godesberg). Each transformation cost substance and brought new substance. The milieu held — as long as there was a milieu.

The milieu is gone. Organised labour is no longer a political class. The trade unions are service organisations. The industrial regions of North Rhine-Westphalia, historically the SPD heartlands, now vote AfD or stay home. The SPD has no core constituency to which it is accountable.

What emerged instead is an administrative party: organised around mandates, functions, careers. Not maliciously — but structurally without roots. At 16.4 percent it is still a governing party. In Thuringia it is at 6 percent. Its inner condition corresponds to the latter, not the former.

The Berlin SPD put it plainly in 2025: "Otherwise, the risk is a descent into political insignificance by 2029." That formulation is the most honest diagnosis a party can write about itself.

The FDP: Brand Without Carrier

The FDP was always more fragile than the SPD — smaller, more elite, more dependent on circumstance. But it had a strength: it was the only party that claimed to embody liberalism as a political principle.

That claim was destroyed in the coalition with the SPD and Greens (2021–2024) — not from outside, but from within. The FDP had entered a coalition with two left-leaning partners as an economic-liberal corrective. The internal tension was insoluble from the start. When they blew up the coalition, the "D-Day paper" was already prepared — a communications plan for the exit, which signals that the party had long since conceived of government as stage rather than as responsibility.

The result: voters believed the party neither as a governing partner nor as an opposition. 4.3 percent is not a verdict on a programme. It is a verdict on credibility.

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation diagnosed it precisely: the FDP has always united two liberalisms — a liberal-conservative and a social-civil-libertarian strand — that in other countries have produced separate parties. In Germany they were held together by a pragmatism that functions as long as it succeeds. When it fails, it falls apart. What remains is a brand without a social carrier.

What Remains — and What Emerges

The question is not whether the FDP and SPD will disappear. The question is what happens to the political space they have occupied.

The vacuum will not stay empty. But it will not be filled by a new centre party — the historical conditions for that no longer exist. What emerges instead are new forms of political organisation: closer to movements, less institutional, bound more tightly around concrete issues than around milieus.

That is no consolation. The party democracy of the Federal Republic was a success model — not despite its orientation towards compromise, but because of it. The centre parties were translation machines between social interests and political decisions. Without them, that translation becomes direct — rawer, shorter-breathed, more vulnerable to populism.

What might come in their place has preoccupied this essay series: the representative without a party as an idea, the individual as a political actor beyond party structures. It is not a programme. It is a search.

The disappearance of the centre parties is not the end of democracy. It is the end of a particular form of democracy — the one we knew in the Federal Republic. What comes after has not yet been invented.

"The first step out of the crisis is to stop treating it as temporary."