Recommendations of the Editorial team
I couldn’t vote for Willy in 1972, but I wouldn’t have chosen Barzel. Willy Brandt’s familiar, grating, tormented tone accompanied me through my youth and beyond. He remained as the oracle and conscience of the SPD and as party chairman. Helmut Schmidt, who succeeded him as chancellor in 1974, often had a different opinion. And Herbert Wehner anyway. This troika was the good old social democracy: side by side and divided.
Only the hiking club in 1994 was similarly funny: Rudolf Scharping, Gerhard Schröder and Oskar Lafontaine formed a triumvirate, and the most unlikely among them was the candidate for chancellor. Scharping achieved the impossible: he lost to Helmut Kohl, who was no longer so popular, and found his private happiness in the swimming pool. Lafontaine gave an incendiary speech at the 1995 party conference and was elected party leader. Then he sulks and joins another party.
Since then, the carousel of SPD chairmen has been spinning ever faster: Gerhard Schröder, Franz Müntefering, Matthias Platzeck, Kurt Beck, Sigmar Gabriel, Martin Schulz, Andrea Nahles, then the tandem of Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans and finally the line-up of Bärbel Bas and Lars Klingbeil. “The best job after Pope,” as grandfather Müntefering called it, can also be filled by duos. But the office goes by quickly.
Did Lars Klingbeil make a big mistake?
The last good speech of the Social Democrats was given by Kevin Kühnert, then Juso chairman, about red socks. You can see this in a long-term documentary on ARD. Bärbel Bas got a little mushy in front of her young comrades when she castigated the gentlemen of industry who were making fun of her, or at least laughing.
Lars Klingbeil did not get along well with Hubertus Heil, the social bear, who is therefore no longer in the cabinet. Some think that Klingbeil made a mistake by having no use for the very popular labor minister.
On the other hand, Heil is “too closely linked to citizens’ money,” as if he had decided and named it alone. The analysis of the notorious “committees” showed that the SPD is no longer the party of the workers. This could be because there are fewer workers than in 1922, but the remaining workers prefer to vote for the AfD. And the citizens’ benefit recipients apparently don’t vote enthusiastically for the SPD, otherwise they would have to get more than 14 percent of the vote.
After Rhineland-Palatinate was lost, Katarina Barley from the Palatinate almost had to cry at Markus Lanz when she had to explain the decline of her party. The explanation goes something like this: The “working middle” no longer feels at home in social democracy. But neither is the working upstairs. And neither does the working bottom. Soon even the unions mutinied.
It’s better not to have any personal consequences
After Olaf Scholz brought the unpopular traffic light to an end, the slowing influence of the small SPD in the coalition is now being criticized. Who flirts with inheritance tax without being able to succeed with this demand in state elections and in the polls. Lars Klingbeil announced personnel consequences after the elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, but does not want to take them because they would affect him and Bas. The candidate Alexander Schweitzer didn’t even travel to Berlin.
The legendary charismatic Boris Pistorius, the last patron of social democracy and highly valued by voters, will not come out of cover. And the SPD should not use up Lower Saxony. He is their only chance that the Social Democrats could nominate another chancellor in three years. If he campaigns against his own party.