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No party has more experience in being declared dead than the SPD. And so, after the election of Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, the old ritual took place again. A good part of the editorial media, the Union, the FDP and a good part of the Twitter bourgeoisie sees the downfall, the SPD in any case, but also the country.
Not always a reason was included, because conservative politics often considers itself as an irrefutable final reason: I exist successfully, so I'm right. On closer inspection, the core of the prophecies of doom is: lack of reason. "Two years ago, reason had prevailed," wrote a conservative newspaper. The SPD had promised not to go to the GroKo and then go to GroKo. This is reasonable only for people who do not direct their own actions to reason - but reinterpret their own actions to reason.
It pays to look at this choice and justification from a digital perspective. Not only because with Saskia Esken for the first time a computer scientist leads a people's party. But because the digital glasses also make it clear earlier what is wronging German politics.
Slowness becomes a danger
Digitization is changing society so profoundly and fast that the harmful effect of "keep it up!" first becomes recognizable. This is true of the dormant digital infrastructure as well as the feeling that large corporations can do whatever they want against any democratic agreement. If digital companies absurdly pay little tax, this fact harms the SPD more than the Union, because Social Democratic voting social justice is more important.
The digital oeuvre of the last three merkel-run federal governments with SPD involvement consists of the continual dissemination of a spirit of optimism, avoiding all acts that really mean a departure. Therefore, to understand a concept seems essential to me, which unfortunately has zero Google hits so far and I would therefore introduce into the debate: Exense.
By reason I mean attitudes that may have been reasonable but are not anymore because the world has changed. The insistence on Exvernunt is one of the big German problems. Germany is a slow country. This can also be turned positive, Germany as a land of thoroughness, care, precision, so strengths that can hardly tolerate too high speed.
But we live in times of radical change, driven above all by digitization, globalization and the threat of a climate catastrophe. Slowness becomes your own danger. Just as when running away from a rabid tiger, it is not primarily about deliberate, small steps, elegant clothing and sufficient breaks. But on speed and a certain overview, if you run into a dead end.
The dark heart of exile is black zero
Digitization means that recipes for success from yesterday and today will not work tomorrow. And that this realization occurs very suddenly, very powerful and very painful - if one believes too long, the mark of yesterday from yesterday remains unchanged.
Esken and Walter Borjans were chosen as protagonists against the exile. Because the SPD has accomplished the feat of repeatedly falling over without getting up in the meantime and each time was the reason for acting "reasonable". In the last twenty years, "reason" has become a cipher for a policy that Angela Merkel has no objections to. Reason is anyway one of the most abused words of politics, which is recognized by the fact that nobody seriously says: I stand for totally unreasonable policy. But what was reasonable yesterday, or at least seemed, today can be no matter, counterproductive or catastrophic, so ex-rational.
The dark heart of exile is black zero with its high priestesses Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz. No SPD team has spoken so openly against the black zero as Esken and Walter Borjans. Meanwhile, almost everyone else is aware that it is dangerous nonsense.
Olaf Scholz is the epitome of the ex-politician
A few weeks ago BDI and DGB - otherwise less than best friends - got together and almost begged to give up the harmful saving. In response, the CDU released one of the most savvy tweets of all time. It belongs on a board made of German oak burned and hung up in the German Museum for warning, in the still to be founded department "Groteske Gegenwartsklitterung": A picture with a black zero wearing a probably sadomasochistic hat, and next to the text "We stand to our fetish ", the background is a slightly alienated German flag, the color red is provided with an artificial leather texture.
Yes, we confess, we have a little fetish: Solid finances without new debt! That is practiced intergenerational justice! And it's the best way to invest in the future. We are both. And our household shows: It's both! pic.twitter.com/abIMN64eMO
- CDU Germany (@CDU) November 27, 2019Olaf Scholz was voted out because he - the epitome of the formerly reasonable, but now ex-sensible politician - this Tweet could also sell. The follow-up slogan of the CDU tries to explain why the black zero is so fetish worthy despite lack of investment: "... The problem is not lack of money, but too long planning procedures and too much bureaucracy."
If you have been in power since 2005, you might have noticed and changed that with the bureaucracy. But the real reason for the too long planning procedures shows how fatal the attitude of Merkel and Scholz is. The German Institute for Economic Affairs examined the situation in 2017 and found that: "Nationwide, the number of employees involved in construction contracts in local government declined by about 35 percent between 1991 and 2010. By 2015, it dropped again by almost ten percent." Knowing that, mainly because of the black-and-white savvy rage, the number of planning administrators has fallen by nearly half over the last 25 years, there is little left to ask why bridges, roads, and schools are in the state they are in Germany today.
Or why in 2017 only three percent of federal broadband funding was distributed. The digital consequences of the exemptive policy of black zero consist of the catastrophic digital infrastructure, of a politically timidly driven digital transformation of the German economy, from a number of laws that show that the GroKos of the last fifteen years at no time have the radicality of the digital Change understood.
Failures in the railway, in education or living
It is true, of course, that the SPD members did not consider this as the decisive reason for their Scholz deselection. But the digital is suitable here as a symbol, because the same mechanisms of failure due to exile have also occurred where the entire population feels them constantly: in the train, in education or living, for example.
If the SPD has been in power for six years and rents have almost doubled, why choose them? The Deutsche Bahn has a rehabilitation backlog of almost sixty billion euros, you can tell it every damn day. From the Union as autoparty of Germany one expects a contempt of public transport, but the SPD takes it badly. Ironically, the railway shows that part of the SPD has always paid homage to the Union's reason in Scholz's sense.
In 1975, then-Minister of Transport Kurt Gscheidle (SPD) complained about an advertising campaign by Deutsche Bahn, "why with millions of dollars the image of a railway expanding into the future is being drafted, while the Bonn railway planners seek to set the course for decommissioning, dismantling and shrinking." Today this sounds absurd, but at that time it seemed reasonable to the SPD. Incidentally, Gscheidle belonged to a predecessor community of the conservative Seeheimer Kreis, the part of the SPD that supported Scholz the loudest. Against the ex-reason!
