Only a few politicians are fortunate in advanced age, that their own party moves towards them and saves them the fate of being deported to the corner of the untimely and die-hard. Erhard Eppler had this luck. The SPD of the year 2019 is probably the SPD that Erhard Eppler had always wanted, or something like that: a rather left-wing, ecologically and peace-engaged party.
All the more he suffered in recent years under the dramatic failure of German social democracy, which is losing more and more approval from election to election, from poll to poll. At his last SPIEGEL conversation in 2016, he answered the question of how these failures could finally be stopped, with a recommendation that his party friends might have been little pleased: "To really win a choice," said Eppler, the SPD would " be dependent on a very strong leader ", otherwise she would be punished with a benevolent disregard.
A "strong leader"? Today, every comrade knows only too well that this charismatic person is nowhere to be seen, and certainly not among the participants in the current candidate race for the next party presidency. "Honorable disregard"? Since Eppler knew himself very well. Whenever he took part in important elections in his active time, he lost them, twice as the SPD's leading candidate in the state elections in Baden-Württemberg in 1976 and 1980.
Intellectual outsider in the struggle for power
Erhard Eppler was never this strong leader, and he was aware of it. From the beginning of his political career, from the founding of the All-German People's Party together with Gustav Heinemann, to joining the SPD in 1956 and joining the German Bundestag in 1961, Eppler always played the role of an intellectual outsider in the struggle for power.
The born in 1926 son of a high school director from Schwäbisch Hall also work initially as a teacher. He owed his rise not least to the promotion by the later Chancellor Willy Brandt. In 1968, during the first grand coalition, Eppler took over the office of Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation - a ministry entirely tailored to his political profile. A massive expansion of development aid for the Third World, as it was then called, was, according to Eppler, one of the core elements of left-wing, emancipatory foreign policy.
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Erhard Eppler: From the critic of the Chancellor to the figure of integrationGerman social democracy in the early 1970s was marked by an internal party competition between the followers of Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. A few weeks after Schmidt took office in 1974, Eppler resigned from the Federal Cabinet. Even his contemporaries knew that Schmidt and Eppler could not relate to each other. And the two celebrated this conflict now over more than a decade as an internal faction struggle. Eppler stood for everything that Schmidt rejected.
Eppler wanted to make ecology the big topic of social democracy, to keep the Greens small - Schmidt mocked only about the "green spinners". Eppler wanted to prevent the retrofitting and deescalate the East-West conflict - Schmidt had the rockets build and made his party for the first time the enemy picture for a whole generation of young people.
Helmut Schmidt reviled Eppler as a "moral ethicist"
Eppler lost again and again against Schmidt. In the end, at least he was quite clear that his opponent had not been wronged with everything. By Helmut Schmidt so much insight is not handed down. Schmidt always reviled his adversary as a naive "moral ethicist" whom he, the "ethics of responsibility" in the sense of Max Weber, was far superior.
What hurt Eppler more than many other attacks, and rightly so. Indeed, this form of programmatic controversy was extremely fruitful for Social Democracy. And of course Eppler had set the right topic; The destruction of the environment served as the main motive of young people in the eighties who wanted to become politically active.
Eppler was honest enough to admit at the end of his life that he too did not know whether a decidedly ecological course of the SPD would have stopped the emergence of the Greens in the end. But it would have been worth a try anyway.
The profoundly Protestant Swabian already lacked the gene of the know-it-all that distinguishes power-hungry politicians. From then on, Eppler concentrated on writing clever political books and on his work in the presidency of the German Kirchentag. One of his last interferences in the current policy was of course Gerhard Schröder benefit, so a Social Democrat, which was at least anchored in the Chancellor years in the Schmidt camp.
Eppler supported the German deployment in the Kosovo war as well as Schröder's Agenda 2010, proving a maneuverability that was quite surprising from the point of view of Eppler's companion. Perhaps this could be a role model for social democratic leaders today-a model of how to impress their contemporaries with gestures of political agility and independence.
