ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the profile of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) voters and the efforts to gain more support among three, partly overlapping, voter segments—youth, the Greens, and the religiously committed electorate. The SPD began to weaken its emphasis on Marxist ideology in order to attract the "bourgeois" voters, despite the Marxist prediction that "all but a handful of exploiters" would become proletarian and flock to the party. The existence of a neo-Marxist wing in the SPD reinforced many bishops' views that the party was still imbued with atheism and Marxism and ready to seize property and precipitate moral decay in a secularized society. Socioeconomic cleavages between SPD and other party voters have persisted even with a shift in their occupations. The SPD has tried to gain votes from devout Protestants and Catholics, a shrinking but nevertheless still important source, and from peace groups affiliated with the churches.
