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Historian Peter Brandt
Photo: Annette Riedl / picture alliance
The SPD has been arguing about the party's identity policy for days.
It started with statements by former Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse, who criticized the party's course.
Now Peter Brandt, the son of the former Chancellor Willy Brandt, is also joining the debate.
In a guest article written together with the publisher Detlef Prinz for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the historian attacks the current party leadership around chairwoman Saskia Esken and her deputy Kevin Kühnert.
Brandt accuses both of "failure".
"Instead of debating their program, the party establishment and capital city media have been grappling with the rift lines of a party that is already suffering from political consumption for a good week," writes Peter Brandt.
"This was avoidable, but the party leader probably wanted it that way."
The background to the dispute between Thierse and the party leadership is an internal e-mail in which Esken and Kühnert were "ashamed" of unnamed SPD representatives who painted a "backward-looking" picture of the party in dealing with "queer people".
Apparently Thierse was meant (read more about the dispute in the party here).
Brandt defends Thierse in the guest post with the headline "How verqueer is the SPD?"
Thierse worried about the cohesion of the community and developed an offer for a minimum consensus within the social democracy.
In normal times, a “sovereign party leadership” would have invited to a (digital) discussion on neutral ground and offered the protagonists “a thoroughly arguable platform”.
According to the authors, this could have been the prelude to a debate - initiated by the SPD - in which the focus is not on exclusion in the sense of the so-called »Cancel Culture«, but rather the question: What do social democrats actually have in common vis-à-vis those that really threaten this democracy?
The fact that this has not happened to this day, but instead is eagerly telephoned around so that the public dispute does not cause irreparable damage to the party, is the actual failure of the SPD leadership, the guest article continues.
The fact that Esken and Kühnert let it come to this point instead of simply apologizing because, in their "shame" towards Thierse, they actually distanced themselves from a considerable part of the SPD members, points to the "core of the superfluous dispute". judge Brandt and Prinz.
At the same time, it shows that the SPD lacks a political compass.
The party leadership is not in a position to politically manage a debate conflict.
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