E.t is the first party congress of the SPD as the Chancellor’s party for 16 years. This is the new thing on this Saturday at the Berlin fair, it shapes the atmosphere and the speeches. A few top politicians are in the room, above all the newly elected Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Most of the around 600 delegates are at home in front of the screens, once again the corona pandemic is preventing a traditional party conference in attendance.
Above all, the election of a new party executive is on the agenda of the mainly digital meeting. There are old friends, first and foremost Lars Klingbeil, who was Secretary General of the SPD for the past four years, and Kevin Kühnert, who succeeds him and was previously deputy party chairman.
A bit of satisfaction can be heard
Klingbeil is now chairman along with the woman who has held this office for two years, Saskia Esken. Esken is confirmed in the election, she receives 76.7 percent of the vote. Lars Klingbeil gets a better result, he receives 86.3 percent.
At the beginning of his application speech, Klingbeil points out that unity in the SPD has not yet lasted that long. He has seen eight party leaders, both elected and acting, as general secretary. He also recalls how, until recently, the party was ridiculed for being asked why it was running a candidate for chancellor in the first place. The answer to this question, “we answered that in the Bundestag last Wednesday,” says the 43-year-old, always balanced-looking cleaver, and you can hear a bit of satisfaction.
Then Klingbeil repeats his mantra from the past few weeks. “A victory in the federal election is not enough for me, I want more”. Of course he is thinking of the state elections in Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and, last but not least, North Rhine-Westphalia. They will all take place in the first half of 2022. CDU Prime Ministers rule there everywhere. And everywhere the SPD has overtaken the Union in surveys. “We are on the threshold of a social democratic decade,” says Klingbeil.
The merging is once again the topic of the “bridge builder” Klingbeil. There is only one SPD, no SPD of the party left and the conservative Seeheimer, of which Klingbeil belongs. The SPD must also bring together the various interests in society. Klingbeil names “the founding team of a start-up in the field of biotechnology in Mainz”, i.e. Biontech, and its success as one example, as another the uncertain future of the workers of a “supplier company for diesel engines in the Lüneburg Heath”, Klingbeil’s home region.
The Scholz confidante also adheres to the advice of his chancellor: do not work on the new coalition partner FDP, but always criticize the CDU and CSU. Klingbeil does it in a rather clumsy way, down to caricature. “We have freed the country from the must of the conservatives,” he says – as if the SPD had not ruled for twelve of the 16 years of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship, who was criticized by her own party for the “social democratization” of the CDU. In the 1990s, the conservatives stood still; for them, economic policy was only a matter of proximity to the economy and lobbyists.
However, the SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, with whom Klingbeil has had a good relationship for around 20 years as a former employee of his constituency office, has also distinguished himself through his proximity to business. One has never heard from Olaf Scholz that he did not pursue business-friendly politics in Hamburg. But now the old front position on the Union can finally be reactivated in a liberated manner in order to warm the hearts of the comrades.
The joy of the new unity also dominates the application speech by Saskia Eskens. She was elected two years ago with Norbert Walter-Borjans, who was not running again on Saturday, because comrades Olaf Scholz and his team partner Klara Geywitz did not want them. However, Esken also ensured that Scholz was candidate for chancellor and is now celebrating the current situation. On Saturday she attested to the Federal Chancellor that he united a “social democratic heart” with government experience.
“The greatest weeks that an SPD chairman can ever imagine are behind us,” says Esken. The time of the “unloved grand coalition” is over, the “SPD is back, we are united as we have not for many years”. She is no longer involved in just one government, she leads it, says Esken. “The people in the country will notice that it makes a difference.” And as if that weren’t enough: “The twenties will be a decade of social democracy.” That is a successful attempt to sound just like the new man at her side in the party chairmanship.
Esken is delighted with the many social democratic posts that the new government has. Whenever it gives the impression that it is becoming programmatic, it is just another attempt at the next burst of joy over a ministerial office occupied by the SPD. No, programmatic discussions are certainly not the focus of this party congress.
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