'We're Standing on a Giant Pile of Manure': Can a New Leadership Save the SPD?

• Print
• E-Mail
• Feedback

In addition to the question as to how to deal with the Left Party, an equally significant challenge for the new SPD leadership is the question of how the party should now position itself in terms of its message. It will have to distinguish itself more strongly from the center-right Christian Democrats, but without betraying its principles or emulating the Left Party.

The SPD's new role as opposition party will presumably help it perform this balancing act. No longer saddled with governing, and no longer forced to accept tedious compromises with reality, it is now free to demand what it wishes. In the future, the business of saving money, ordering cutbacks and introducing reforms will be up to the new CDU/CSU-FDP coalition government.

Gabriel and his new friends are pinning their hopes on the public quickly forgetting the former SPD-Green Party administration of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the Agenda 2010 reforms it enacted. They are pursuing a strategy of letting fading memories weaken even further. The new administration's first painful reform will give them the opportunity to claim that things weren't half as bad when the SPD was in power as they are now under Merkel and FDP leader Guido Westerwelle.

To avoid giving up their claim to being a mass party, Gabriel and Nahles will not adopt an explicitly left-leaning course. They also want to continue appealing to the broadest spectrum of voters possible, because a red-red-green alliance can only hope to get a majority in the Bundestag if at least one of the coalition partners focuses on the center. "We must make it clear that we also support the things that matter to the middle class," says Gabriel.

This suggests that although they will distance themselves from Agenda 2010 to some degree, they will not condemn it completely. Even representatives of Nahles's left wing believe that this would only erode the SPD's credibility even further. Former Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse agrees. "We can't all just disown 11 years," he told fellow SPD members during a meeting of the party's parliamentary group last Tuesday. "We all supported those things at the time."

'Extremely Tough'

If Gabriel, Steinmeier and Nahles have their way, the party will only make minor corrections, if any, to its current direction.

Whether this will be enough for the majority of SPD members in the party's base remains to be seen. The base is applying enormous pressure to forget everything the SPD was preaching only yesterday, and this pressure will only grow leading up to the party's national convention in Dresden in mid-November. Now the base wants results. It will bombard the new leadership with petitions, most of them with the goal of shifting the party to the left. In concrete terms, this amounts to a radical departure from Agenda 2010, the withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan and higher taxation of the well-off.

"Dresden will be extremely tough," predicts one of the members of the gang of four. Left-leaning party members have already drafted their first internal strategy documents outlining all the things they want to see change in the future. For instance, Ottmar Schreiner, one of the party's leading leftists, and members of an SPD committee on employee issues have assembled a four-page list of their demands. "The election defeat is our comeuppance for the SPD pursuing the wrong course over the last 11 years, particularly during the red-green administration (of Gerhard Schröder)," the document reads, adding that the SPD needs to correct its positions on the Hartz IV system and a retirement age of 67.

To look for ways to apply more pressure to the new leadership, the party's left wing met at Pizzeria Yasmin last Thursday evening. The rustic Italian restaurant, a stone's throw from SPD headquarters in Berlin, is a popular place for small celebrations. But the 10 party members were in no mood to celebrate, and a mood of discontent quickly became evident at their table in the restaurant's back room.

No More Taboos

They feel taken by surprise by recent events. It angers them that at the end of this turbulent week, there is still not a single leftist in the party leadership or the SPD's parliamentary leadership. "The process was really not okay," complained Hermann Scheer, a member of the SPD national executive board. Many SPD leftists resent the fact that Frank-Walter Steinmeier had already secured the position as leader of the party's parliamentary group on the evening of the elections.

"The party needs a new beginning. There can be no more taboos," growled Ralf Stegner, a senior party official in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. Niels Annen, another SPD member of the Bundestag, agreed: "We must finally talk about everything that has happened in the last 11 years."

In recent days, the party's left wing has desperately tried to secure its influence. There are deep-seated fears that perhaps little will change, even with Nahles as general secretary. On this evening, the group tosses around the names that have been mentioned in connection with the new leadership, the board and the executive committee. Who is one of us? Who is in the other camp?

No matter how much more the social democratic movement declines in significance, and no matter how small the party gets, this is the question that will probably always play the key role in the SPD.

MARKUS DEGGERICH, MARKUS DETTMER, MARKUS FELDENKIRCHEN, CHRISTOPH HICKMANN, KERSTIN KULLMANN, ROLAND NELLES, CHRISTIAN SCHWÄGERL, CHRISTOPH SCHWENNICKE, STEFFEN WINTER

• Back
• 1
• | 2
• | 3
• | 4

• Part 1: Can a New Leadership Save the SPD?
• Part 2: End of an Era
• Part 3: The SPD's Deep Uncertainty
• Part 4: Staying in the Center