essay
Anyone who has ever been invited to a party, where the "house blessing hung wrong" and an early divorce or separation of the inviting people was expected, felt reminded during the SPD party conference last weekend. What is said in such a situation is much less true or serious than the threatening unspeakable unspoken, and one is glad when it is over.
It was a celebration of hypocrisy. The beautiful sayings and rituals could not hide the bouts waiting to be continued.
Who are these people on stage?
While in speeches and speeches new beginning, cohesion and good feelings were summoned, from the ranks of the delegates in Berlin private messages arrived, which conveyed a completely different picture. Even hardened comrades struggled with their composure, seeking comfort in times when the situation was desperate, and found none in this century. One, a politician with the best of nerves, wrote "It was worse in 1933-1945, but ..."
No one said it, but an honest inventory should have stood at the beginning of the congress, a confession of self-made perplexity. Viewers could come up with stupid questions: Who are the people who represent the SPD at the party congress? They got used to Andrea Nahles, Sigmar Gabriel and Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, now they do not matter anymore - but why exactly? What about SPD friends who thought that these three did a good job? It was like in the long-running series "Dallas", when the role of Miss Ellie was suddenly taken over by another actress, without any explanation. New people, same text.
Now the situation is that the SPD leadership now wants to get to know Angela Merkel and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. The magic of the beginning is a nice thing, but the SPD has elected Angela Merkel as Chancellor for the third time. Since 2005, it has brought the citizens this stable, but also somewhat silent Merkelzeit. The comrades in the Federal Cabinet have taken an oath of office - and on the other hand, the top of the party would like to take a picture of the situation and take a look. As if a bus driver stops on the track and goes in, asks himself whether he should not go back to the depot, or out into the countryside or maybe would prefer a passenger? Humanely you can feel it, but you will not ride with it anymore.
Hardly anyone understands this "New Age"
The motto of the congress was the "New Age" - but the more you think about it, the more unfolded by the bold claim a problem, because this determined epoch division is based solely on internal processes of the party. In this sense, the internal voting success of Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter Borjans begins a new era, because they succeed Andrea Nahles. But it was neither neoliberal nor rich in wealth and had nothing to do with the Agenda 2010, but an accomplished and successful social politician whose political course of the now confirmed at the party congress barely deviated.
The new time is calculated according to a calendar that hardly anyone understands. In any case, the SPD clearly distances itself from one party, namely from itself. The overcoming of Hartz IV today, in a situation characterized by a lack of manpower and not by mass unemployment, is not an important political one, but a purely symbolic one Decision. It is directed against the former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, hence the only social democrat who inhabited the Chancellery in this century. One can understand the criticism of Schröder - but are there really no more worthwhile opponents in this world for today's Social Democrats than formerly ruling Social Democrats?
In the exclusion of persons, in the departure of decisions of the own history the party is great, then the core of the true SPD becomes ever narrower. We are already considering and certainly working on turning the newly crowned chairmen into a duo of transition, and why should they fare differently from Andrea Nahles and Martin Schulz? There is no story the party would have developed from its own recent past. It's just a sequence of people to whom you can somehow blame, because they were not Willy Brandt. As if to save a party by a person.
Kay Nietfeld / DPA
New SPD leadership duo Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken
It is a process of disintegration, the party has become addicted to the constant demarcation of itself. What was the deeper strategic wisdom to fail the Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who was appointed by the SPD, in the first round of the election, only to vote for him then? How should loyal supporters of the party feel after the congress? Someone who in 2013 appreciated the more leftist election program and the candidate Peer Steinbrück? There were some of them, he gave the SPD their best election result of the recent epoch. Who explains to those who since then had to be called four or five new epochs in the SPD era, all of which were accompanied by further shrinking poll numbers and election results. All sorts of groups would like to consider the SPD, but what about the recent voters of the Social Democrats?
The course leads inwards
The situation is similar with the gossip about millionaires popular at the congress. Germany is luckier with the wealthy, they do not burn their assets to promote the radical right and are politically moderate. There are very wealthy people who choose SPD out of conviction, history that really likes ideas - but is it still based on reciprocity? Does the SPD now demand the vow of poverty and is that an attractive promise? There have long been the self-employed, middle class and students who are financially under pressure even though they are not classically classed as poor - they are of little help with expanded educational opportunities. For such people, the SPD offers little, even at scientists, entrepreneurs and people from creative professions, she seems little interested.
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Someone has said something about a brand core of the party and everyone believed it, since then the focus has been on the creator and recipient of social policies. The party, which once created the office of the Federal Cultural Commissioner in the rank of secretary of state, has a cultural break.
The course of the party is as clear as daylight, it leads further and further inside, to earlier. It would have to work like Ikea, the store you look for in life changes you do not have to love, but where somehow everyone meets. Instead, the party like a special shop full of items in which all wear gray smocks, strangers eyeing suspicious and scorn sneer, if one does not know the technical term for the missing screw.
"Culture of hate"
Instead of opening the store and developing curiosity about what is going on in the country, the party overburdens itself with the claim to be able to save everyone at any time and to have an unerring moral compass. The truth is different: The SPD is at least as badly prepared for the time after Merkel as the Union and has in view of the declining voters' proposition a bad culture of intrigue, if not a "culture of hatred" (Wolfgang Thierse) developed. The succession was complicated, so you looked at the Greens quickly the double top and the base decision - the latter has a mixed tradition in the SPD. So determined the party base on "Day of the Local Association" in 1993 Rudolf Scharping succeeding Björn Engholm, preferred Gerhard Schröder and secured Helmut Kohl four more years in office.
Attempts to return to a merely suspected, vague origin by turning away from one's own positions and individuals, aggravate the problem, for the image of a bitterly self-centered, self-aggrandizing party that obviously loves the auto-conflict more than people in the country, invites you to respectfully refrain until things are clear. And what is said during such a Ehekrachs with itself to promises and threats everything, you do not put on the gold scale.
The Berlin party congress was accompanied medially with almost touching sincerity. The SPD could set up a network of clementines, there were still scrupulous texts about the fact that people have indeed disappointed and tropical fruits are healthy. Politically, the congress was a liberating departure for the black-green political camp. The courage to leave the coalition is as lacking as their robust defense or commitment to the Left Alliance with Greens and Leftists.
The SPD is stuck and feels well. Should it not be enough here or there for the majority, the SPD as a competent specialist for social policy at any time ready.
