“Researchers come across this paradox time and again,” said Marius Busemeyer, one of the study’s authors. “German voters are pessimistic in the abstract, but optimists when it comes to their personal financial situation.
For parties of the left, this poses an immense challenge of political framing: it’s very hard to create a debate around wealth or inheritance tax, for example, without voters’ conservative instincts kicking in.”
Compounding the problem was an additional misperception, said Busemeyer: most German voters to perceive income equality to be larger than wealth inequality – when in fact the latter is three times larger than the former.
Correcting this misperception could unlock much-needed political potential for the left, which is struggling to make itself heard on the issue.
Die Linke is campaigning for the September vote on the promise of bringing back a national wealth tax – suspended in Germany since 1997 – under which people owning more than €2m (£1.7m) would part with up to 30% of their wealth over a 20-year period.
But the party, which brought together old communists of East Germany and disillusioned Social Democrats when it was founded in 2007, is currently polling on an underwhelming 6-8% of the vote, down from federal elections in 2017.
The SPD, which has governed as junior partner to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union for the last two terms, has made a more moderate proposal of a 1% annual tax on wealth exceeding €2m.
Led by the finance minister, Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrats trail the CDU and the Green party by more than 10 percentage points in the latest polls.