Germany's Left Party.PDS and the ‘Vacuum Thesis’: From regional milieu party to left alternative?

Abstract

The ‘vacuum hypothesis’ became fashionable in the late 1990s to explain the continuing upturn in the PDS's electoral fortunes. It posited that the PDS had begun to occupy an ideological void on the left of the German party system that had opened up with the rightward shift of the governing SPD and Greens. However, although the subsequent election results offered at best qualified support for this thesis, party reformers in the PDS remained its proponents because it pointed the communist successor party towards a continuing process of programmatic modernization. In part it was the failure of the PDS to meet the expectations of the vacuum thesis that led the party in 2005 to join forces with dissident Social Democrats in western Germany.