Lars Klingbeil, Federal Minister of Finance and, Alongside Bärbel Bas, Co-Leader of the SPD
SPD's crushing defeat in Baden-Württemberg exposes deeper party crisis
Just 5.5 percent of Baden-Württemberg's voters cast their ballots for the SPD. There was little mockery or scorn—instead, many who had jumped on the Cem Özdemir bandwagon, swept up in the media spectacle, felt a twinge of shame. In fact, the SPD is often underestimated, even unfairly maligned.
While the Greens can get away with anything—even introducing Palantir's surveillance software failed to ruffle their supposedly Trump-critical base—the SPD is held to a far harsher standard. Hartz IV reforms drove the first nail into the coffin of its status as a people's party, and the traffic-light coalition years hammered in the next. Twenty years ago, the idea of making someone like Olaf Scholz chancellor would have been met with uproarious laughter at an SPD party conference.
Before and after the traffic-light coalition, the SPD was the junior partner. It bears responsibility not only for the Merkel years of inaction and the steady decay of infrastructure but also for whatever the CDU/CSU will get up to in the next three years. Yet the party's unofficial preamble remains unchanged: the SPD must be in government at all times, no matter how limited its influence. The consequences are plain to see: the SPD has been governed into the ground, strangled by its own compromises, and no longer has a single issue where voters don't retort at campaign stands that it's part of the problem, not the solution.
Christoph Ruf is a freelance writer who, in his weekly nd column "Platzverhältnisse" ("Seating Arrangements"), observes political and sporting events.
The SPD's response to all these body blows? A timid more-of-the-same. Had the party's ten remaining state lawmakers in Stuttgart been needed to form a coalition, they would have dutifully fallen in line—after the party leadership had already divvied up the spoils. But in politics, as in life, when you keep making the same mistakes, it's wise to take a step back and reflect. An SPD in opposition would do a Merz-led government good. More importantly, it would do the SPD itself good. In the southwest, there are still members demanding that the party leave "no stone unturned." One can only hope they don't give up.
Resistance from the establishment, of course, is to be expected. And that is the party's real problem. At the grassroots level—in some state parliaments, town halls, and the European Parliament—you still find intelligent, thoughtful people. But time and again, it's these very people who hand power to the Scholzes, Klingbeils, and their clones across the states. Klingbeil, let's recall, moved so swiftly after the last federal election that one has to wonder if he even voted SPD. In a manner both personally and politically contemptible, he sidelined Saskia Esken and Hubertus Heil to seize the party leadership and the finance ministry.
Esken had already been thrown to the wolves by one Sascha Binder. After the 5.5 percent debacle, he resigned as state secretary-general—the man responsible for the campaign—only to be elected parliamentary group leader a few hours later. A textbook Klingbeil maneuver.
It's true: Unimaginative, ruthless men in every party confuse naked ambition with leadership. But only in the SPD do they keep promoting the fox to guard the henhouse—and with such relish.
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