For decades, the core electorate of social democratic parties has been shrinking along with the working class milieu. In order to remain successful, they had to conquer new groups of voters. At the turn of the millennium, the truism of party strategists was: elections are decided in the middle. Therefore, social democratic parties have moderated their economic policy in order to steal voters away from conservative parties – and at least temporarily with success, as the Labor Party under Tony Blair or the SPD under Gerhard Schröder showed.
