Introduction

In the French political drama series Baron noir , the hero played by Kad Merad gets increasingly irritated at a rival leader of France’s Socialist Party pushing his ‘damned Bad Godesberg.’ This expression – a reference to the 1959 congress at which Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) is often imagined to have repudiated Marxism – has become a fixture in the French political vernacular, well illustrating this programme’s special place in the country’s public life. The name Bad Godesberg is synonymous with a doctrinal reversal and has long been a reference point for figures in France’s Socialist Party who want an ideological shift in a less statist, more market-oriented direction. It’s not just in France: elsewhere, too, this SPD programme has become a model, indeed a symbol of doctrinal modernisation, embraced by various socialist and social-democratic parties. Some observers and political figures even see European social democracy’s many ‘Bad Godesbergs’ as one of the reasons for its collapse.