It would mean trivializing the current situation to interpret the crisis facing the SPD and the Greens primarily as a weakness specific to those two parties. In nearly all Western democracies, center-left parties are under pressure, as are center-right parties. What is eroding is not a type of party, but a political model. The latter offered a combination of economic growth, social openness, and international interdependence from which greater prosperity, security, and freedom were supposed to emerge through rules-based procedures and institutions. The setbacks experienced by the SPD and Greens amount to a crisis of liberalism, itself and that is hitting progressives particularly hard because they have believed in this model the most. Accordingly, there has been an intensive quest at the international level for ways out of this crisis.
At two major gatherings of the progressive camp this spring—in Barcelona in April and in Toronto in May—three themes emerged that are currently at the center of almost everything. All three are instructive, but none can be applied to Germany without reservation.
The dominant theme in Barcelona and Toronto was the rising cost of living. Behind this lies an important insight: inflation is politically more difficult to address than unemployment. Someone who loses their job and finds a new one returns to their original position. But a person suffering from rising prices does not experience such a return to the status quo ante, because prices remain high even when the rate of inflation falls. Thus, frustration is permanently inscribed in economic trends. It is remarkable that foreign countries have responded to the dilemma of inflation not so much by offering relief to individuals as by making public goods available to everyone. The German reflex is the opposite and—as seen most recently with the tax cut on fuels introduced by the government—involves selective cost reductions.
What the „affordability“ agenda fails to deliver, however, is precisely what Germany needs most urgently. While it’s true that the gross domestic product is rarely a topic of conversation at the kitchen table, that does not change the fact that our growth model is reaching its structural limits. An affordability policy that merely cushions the symptoms of the crisis buys time, but not a future.
The Enemy
The second hot topic at those conferences was the identification of a common adversary, and the choice was clear: Donald Trump and the oligarchic networks of tech billionaires who support his agenda. The New Right has thrived for years on clear-cut enemy stereotypes; it is understandable that progressives would respond with an equally well-defined counter-narrative. Pedro Sánchez has demonstrated how much commitment can be generated when a head of government emerges who speaks with moral clarity.
But the preconditions for political decision-making in Germany are different. From those in Spain. The latter is not constrained by history in the same way as Germany and does not play a leading role in the alliance on the Ukraine issue; those who have less to lose can speak more clearly. Anyone who is serious about supporting Ukraine must, at least in that context, treat Trump as a potential partner as well. And distance does matter here. Canada has a neighbor that openly flirts with annexation, while Europe has the Atlantic Ocean between itself and the USA. Moreover, oligarchic structures on the scale seen in the U.S. do not exist here. If red lines between friend and foe are to be drawn, in Germany they would have to run across the internal political landscape. And here we still lack the distinction between those who create value and those who siphon it off.
The third key issue is probably the best known: The state must deliver—that is, solve problems—by investing, digitizing, and cutting red tape, and it must do so quickly. There is a lot of truth to this insofar as it is, of course, the task of politics to manage all those things. Also, a highly visible capacity for problem-solving matters a great deal when it comes to rebuilding trust.
The catch, however, is that behind this approach—in its absolutist form—lurks a problematic understanding of politics. Anyone who frames politics solely as a problem-solving machine invites citizens to behave like customers. „Social Policy for You,“ the slogan of the last Social Democratic federal election campaign, sums up the relationship: for you, not with you. We’ll solve your problem; you give us your vote. But customers expect flawless service, and this expectation cannot be met structurally because the premise is flawed. Politics is not providing a service; instead, it is the organizational form of what people do together when the tasks at hand overwhelm the individual.
This also highlights a central shortcoming of the international center-left debate: it seeks answers to the material crisis, but too rarely to the crisis of meaning. This does not imply that a better narrative must be added to service-provision—that would amount to a second version of the same trap: understanding the creation of political meaning as a task of communication and thus, once again, as a technical problem. International examples are particularly interesting where the source of meaning lies within practical politics itself.
Mark Carney in Canada and Andy Burnham in the United Kingdom currently offer two examples that suggest what this might look like. In Canada, the issue is the capacity to act: Who is being addressed—the customer or the citizen? Burnham’s „Manchesterism“ is about belonging: Once something has been built, to whom does it belong?
Carney: Control Through Participation
Unlike the New Right, Mark Carney responds to the widely felt loss of control not by sealing off his country from the rest of the world but through an expansionary project in which citizens are involved. The sovereign wealth fund announced this spring is intended to give them a share in the profits from the ports, networks, and natural resource projects that the state is building. The historical counter-image is the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose profits once flowed entirely into private hands. In foreign policy, the pattern repeats itself. Canada is not waiting for the return of the old order, but is forging a network of flexible cooperation among middle powers—from the Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine to participation in the EU’s SAFE procurement program. Sovereignty manifests itself on three interrelated levels: the state, which cannot be blackmailed; society, the institutions of which actually work; the individual, who can shape his or her own life.
The key point from the Canadian example is the distinction between relief and participation. Carney frames this approach as „nation-building“: The state does not merely provide relief but mobilizes people for a shared project. Those who receive relief remain recipients; those who participate become co-owners. Wealth creation among broad segments of the population is a blind spot in the progressive camp here, even though it has a greater impact on self-determination than most debates about relief. Two caveats: Canadian cohesion draws heavily on the contrast with Trump; this sense of „we“ is borrowed. And the fund is so far merely a gleam in the Canadian eye, the details of which are also controversial in Canada.
Burnham: The Productive State
When Greater Manchester brought its buses back under public management, the switch could have been handled as a mere matter of administrative procedure. Andy Burnham turned it into a conflict, complete with opponents and a resolution; today, the Bee Network operates in areas where private operators had abandoned service as unprofitable. Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams subsequently provided a theoretical framework for this practice: a sense of belonging arises from what people share, not from what they can afford—the same principle underlies Zohran Mamdani’s New York model of means-tested childcare. The state acts not only a corrective to the market, but as a producer.
For Germany, the benefit lies in a surprising place. What the United Kingdom must painstakingly recover after 40 years of privatization, we have long possessed: municipal utilities, cooperative housing construction companies, public transit, and thrift savings banks. We do not lack public ownership; we lack its politicization. What are called public utilities or services here in Germany essentially rely on the productive state, but we treat such public services merely as administrative matters rather than as aspects of economic policy. Burnham calls this understanding of politics „Place-first Politics“: Politics is not experienced through contacts with governmental agencies and departments; rather it is felt in specific places—at school, at the swimming pool, at the train station, or in the town square. There it is decided whether the state is perceived as a distant service-provider or whether the commonwealth will be understood as something of one’s own.
This is a matter of political practice and is therefore less costly than any structural reform. What is missing, however, is the institutional level: a directly elected mayor of a metropolitan region with independent authority over transportation, housing, and policing has no German equivalent, and our municipalities are financially drained. And in any case it remains to be seen whether the model championed by Burnham can be scaled up. He has been the British prime minister since the end of June and is attempting to apply the logic of regional government to an entire country.
Two Tasks
There are many reasons why Germany should not try to import a specific model. We lack the external contrast from which Canada derives its cohesion, as well as a clearly identifiable economic adversary. Moreover, in this country one of the two center-left parties, the SPD, governs as the junior partner in a coalition with the Christian Democrats, while the other center-left party, the Greens, is in the opposition. What we should take away from the international debate is not a blueprint to be copied but a direction—and the admission that the road ahead will be very long.
The first task is to regain interpretive sovereignty over the narrative. Progressive politics has long fared well by presenting itself as the more competent manager of the status quo. The liberal model demanded that the state remain neutral on the question of what constitutes a good life, and this restraint was considered a virtue. Where the old liberal certainties are eroding, this restraint becomes a disadvantage: Those who offer no vision of what a good life in a good society looks like leave the field open to those who do. This does not mean that the state should dictate how people should live; it means that politics must once again be able to explain why it does what it does.
The first task is to regain interpretive sovereignty over the narrative. Progressive politics has long fared well by presenting itself as the more competent manager of the status quo. The liberal model demanded that the state remain neutral on the question of what constitutes a good life, and this restraint was considered a virtue. Where the old liberal certainties are eroding, this restraint becomes a disadvantage: Those who offer no vision of what a good life in a good society looks like leave the field open to those who do. This does not mean that the state should dictate how people should live; it means that politics must once again be able to explain why it does what it does.
These two tasks go hand in hand: And the progressive question is also: How do we want to depict the proper relationships among the individual, the state, and society? We don’t want to describe the individual as a recipient of state services, but rather as a participant. Nor should we cast the state as a repair shop, but instead as a commonly shared power engaged in shaping the future. Both are tasks that will take years, not just one legislative term. The alternative would be to carry on as before.
This is not about meaning versus substance. Practical politics is the prerequisite for everything, and in Germany, that prerequisite is currently not being met. But it is the means, not the end. Ultimately, what matters is not how much politics delivers, but whether a vision of the good life is discernible in what it delivers.
What is decisive, therefore, is not only what politics delivers, but also the role in which people see themselves in the process. Simply removing burdens from their shoulders turns them into recipients; „deliverism“ turns them into customers. Participation and the shared use of public goods, on the other hand, can create something else: the feeling of being co-owners, co-creators, and members of a community.
This article was first published on 21st of September 2026 in Issue 10/26 of the Frankfurter Hefte.
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