REating is exhausting and exhausting. This can also be observed in the capital, where the SPD’s top candidate and still governing mayor, Franziska Giffey, is trying to collect the remnants of her power. But despite the high losses in the election on Sunday, the party is sticking with her. According to the motto: The SPD couldn’t win with Giffey, but without her you would have lost even more. That’s a pretty sad statement. But the election loser Giffey is almost without alternative. And it is not only in the capital that it is evident that the Chancellor’s Party has an alarming number of white spots in terms of personnel.
Scholz has little personal freedom of movement. But that presumably doesn’t bother him, since he has so far given the impression that he is primarily focusing on continuity and stability. He would not have kicked the hapless Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht out of the cabinet, she was that herself. And Nancy Faeser apparently easily got him to agree to remain Federal Minister of the Interior after an election defeat in Hesse. The loser Giffey therefore has nothing to fear from Scholz.
Scholz does not have to fear any competition from the federal states
However, this is not an expression of strength, but of weakness. The party also restricts itself by sticking to various internal party distribution keys – north/south, east/west, left/right, male/female. Ironically, parity, to which the SPD feels committed, inhibits social mobility in a party, see Lambrecht. When Boris Pistorius took office, there was great relief. Anyone who takes parity seriously must first lay the foundations in terms of personnel in order to have a choice of politicians in their own party who are capable of becoming ministers. Because Scholz didn’t do that, he damaged the women’s cause by switching to Pistorius. Precisely because the decision in the matter was the right one.
Pistorius was previously a state minister in Lower Saxony. So does the SPD not have a personnel problem at all, but rather enough good people in the federal states? The SPD is doing well on paper. In half of all federal states – three of which are city states – it provides the prime minister. Getting the names of the eight SPD state leaders together is likely to be difficult for most citizens. Their ambition also ends at their respective country and city borders. When the SPD was looking for a new party leadership a few years ago, none of the sovereigns wanted to take on the job. Certainly none of them came up with the idea of contesting Scholz’s chancellor candidacy.
It is good when the prime ministers concentrate on their countries. During the corona pandemic, the influence of the prime ministers continued to increase, which made their posts even more attractive. At the same time, especially in the SPD, a dislike of federal politics has been cultivated for many years, which is harmful. The federal and state governments live side by side too much.
State politics used to be the springboard for advancement in the federal government. Before his time as Chancellor, Willy Brandt was the governing mayor of Berlin, Helmut Schmidt was a senator in Hamburg, Helmut Kohl was prime minister of Rhineland-Palatinate and Gerhard Schröder of Lower Saxony. Schröder probably used the state chancellery most shamelessly as a stepping stone (“The next chancellor must be a Lower Saxony”). Irony of fate: The close connection between state and federal politics helped Schröder to rise – and accelerated his fall. After the lost state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, he announced new elections in 2005. Rather unlikely that Scholz would hang his fate on a state election.
Currently, one can get the impression that the springboard theory works the other way around. Giffey rose from Neukölln district mayor to federal family minister, but then quickly returned to state politics after losing her doctorate and Michael Müller’s departure and won her longing for a position as governor. Similar to Nancy Faeser, who must have had the Hessian election date in October in mind when she took over as Federal Minister of the Interior a good year ago.
During his political career, Scholz repeatedly alienated his party and vice versa. The chancellorship and the war in Ukraine may be covering that up a bit at the moment, but in principle this is still the case. In this respect, Scholz does not consider it his biggest problem if at some point only an SPD government torso remains. It’s still a problem for him in the long run.