The SPD special party convention on the coalition agreement becomes a belated victory celebration in the federal election. Speakers cannot praise the importance of the moment highly enough. The party is bursting with self-confidence, but also needs the FDP as an opponent for its unity.
The SPD’s early decision to hold the special party conference on the coalition agreement largely digitally was a wise decision. Because how could the gathering of more than 600 Social Democrats from all over the country not have turned into a superspreader event? The party is experiencing a frenzy in these weeks that would have broken into hugs and caresses at a face-to-face event, despite all the rules of distance. 99 percent approval of the coalition agreement and a downright happy Olaf Scholz speak volumes about the happiness of the moment.
“I can’t remember a comparable situation,” says Franziska Giffey, whose state SPD will vote on the coalition agreement with the Greens and Leftists for the capital on Sunday, afterwards on the Phoenix broadcaster. Another can remember: Olaf Scholz, at 63 years of age one of the oldest speakers this Saturday, was eleven when Willy Brandt forged the first social democratic government in the Federal Republic of Germany. At the age of 40, the lawyer Scholz entered the Bundestag for the first time when the SPD pushed Helmut Kohl out of office in 1998 and formed the first red-green coalition in the federal government.
In this series, Scholz says with his usual self-confidence, he also sees this moment when he sets out to lead the first traffic light coalition at federal level as Chancellor. “We should succeed in such a departure again,” says Scholz in the atrium of the Willy Brandt House, with the larger than life statue of the SPD icon standing next to the stage.
Remembering bitter moments
It has only been four months since the polls for the federal election suddenly announced the long unthinkable: the SPD as the strongest force. The protagonists of this Phoenix-from-the-ashes story have not forgotten how abnormal this special party conference was from the perspective of the time, when the party cleared one last formal hurdle before the election of Scholz as Federal Chancellor.
Scholz mentions the nearby bistro, “where we agreed in a clandestine manner and not noticed by anyone that I should become the SPD’s candidate for Chancellor”. “We”, that is the chairmen Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, Secretary General Lars Klingbeil and SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich. The fact that the group kept silent about the agreement for weeks is considered in the legends within the party to be the cornerstone of the trust and unity with which the SPD leadership contested the election campaign that was ultimately successful.
How difficult these months must have been, when nobody else in the country believed in an SPD election victory, not only shines through on this Saturday for Scholz. “I still remember how many journalists put their pads and pens aside in background discussions when I told them that Olaf Scholz was going to be Chancellor,” says Klingbeil, who will succeed Walter-Borjans as party chairman next week. “There was a whole series of malice, ridicule and know-it-all,” says Walter-Borjans.
The weakness of others is not an issue
And it’s also true: Hardly any of the capital’s journalists saw the SPD victory coming. The chairman duo Esken and Walter-Borjans, without national political experience and beyond the then Juso chairman Kevin Kühnert without well-known allies in Berlin, were repeatedly found to be too easy. Political analyzes predicted constant conflicts between the three leftists and the more conservative currents of the party, for which Scholz, as a survivor of the Schröder years and long-time GroKo minister, was exemplary. But Esken and Walter-Borjans did not fall, nor did they fall out in public with Scholz. Content-related and strategic conflicts in the party leadership did not make the headlines.
Accordingly, the Social Democrats are celebrating enthusiastically on this Saturday for their programmatic work and personal unity. Against the background of the crisis years after 2005, especially under the chairmen Sigmar Gabriel, Martin Schulz and Andrea Nahles, that seems justified. The fact that the SPD’s victory in the Bundestag election is also due to the weakness of its opponents, blatant beginners’ mistakes by the two candidates for chancellor and the declining enthusiasm among the party and the population after 16 years of unionism is not part of the SPD election victory analysis.
Boldly calls for happiness
On the contrary: Saskia Esken adopts Klingbeil’s slogan that the election victory must be the start of a “social democratic decade”. “We also want this not to remain a singular success for the party,” says Malu Dreyer, Prime Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate and transitional chairwoman after the disastrous Nahles departure. It sounds a bit like heights, especially since even the structural correctives have been seized by the new creative power: Five Juso speakers speak up, including chairwoman Jessica Rosenthal. They state that when it comes to basic security and rents, social policy issues of the SPD failed because of the FDP, but they also praise the contract and recommend approval.
Kevin Kühnert, Rosenthal’s chairman predecessor and opponent of Scholz in the dispute over the last GroKo and in the race for the SPD party chairmanship in 2019, asks “for approval of the coalition agreement and for appropriate happiness on this beautiful day today”. Before that, he quickly wrote an enthusiastic tweet about his former nemesis Scholz. Kühnert also says that he is not entirely happy with the coalition agreement with the Liberals. For peace within the SPD, it is crucial how long the Christian Lindner party will be sufficient as a scapegoat and when the first call on Scholz to assert himself against the FDP, which has been reviled as “neoliberal”.
For the moment, however, the satisfaction with the socio-political, socio-political and climate-political agreements with the FDP and the Greens predominates. Out of 634 voters, 618 take part in the vote on the coalition agreement. 98.8 percent of them vote “yes”. Olaf Scholz comments with a brief “let’s get down to work”, for which the excited people present reward him with laughter. But he must have meant it seriously.