A casual observer might think Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) won last Sunday’s federal election because its flinty frontman Olaf Scholz repeated to voters, for eight weeks, the same three ideas.
Over and over, on campaign stops from Hamburg to Heidelberg, Scholz murmured his robotic rosary with an efficiency worthy of his nickname: Scholzomat.
First: Germany needs to do politics for ordinary, oft-neglected, workers, from key employees to low-earners. Second: Germany must modernise its industry and press ahead with climate protection, he insisted, but in a socially-balanced way. And third, he summed up the SPD campaign in the emotive, yet nebulous word: respect.
On Sunday evening, in a typical show of low-key triumph, Scholz said: “People want a change of government, a government lead by Social Democrats.”
After years of largely self-inflicted decline, Germany’s oldest party has staged a rollercoaster comeback: plunging to 14 per cent in the polls as late as June before snapping upward to finish first on 25.7 per cent.
Unsure whether it was centrist or leftist, the party finally began a reform process in 2019 which lead to this election's centre-left manifesto
The Scholz-SPD plan to take back the chancellery for the first time in almost two decades was not rolled out in a few weeks. It was four years in the making, devised by Lars Klingbeil, the SPD’s lanky, dimpled general secretary, who cheered on election night: “The SPD is back on the pitch!”
It was Klingbeil who got his party back in training after its disastrous result in 2017, when it won just 20.5 per cent of the vote.
He commissioned an external working group to analyse the 2017 campaign and published its stark report – “Learning from Mistakes” – on the party’s website for all the read.
It pulled no punches in its portrait of a feud-riven failing party, wracked by organised irresponsibility and chaotic communication. The SPD’s warring “camps and wings ... [creates] an understanding of politics that no one outside the party understands”.
Boiled down to one point, the report recommended: “The SPD must again adopt a political standpoint from which policy is drawn.”
Decline
The report reads like the diagnosis of a party in terminal decline. Three terms as a grand coalition junior partner to Angela Merkel created a curious looking-glass reality. The ostensibly centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) chancellor rarely had ideas of her own but was quick to take credit when SPD proposals proved popular, in particular welfare deals and the minimum wage.
The SPD was too distracted to fight back, obsessively picking at an identity crisis scab left by the Schröder-era reforms in 2003. Unsure whether it was centrist or leftist, it finally began a reform process in 2019 which lead to this election’s centre-left manifesto – but further feuds triggered another leader resignation.
In the subsequent race, SPD rank and file rejected Scholz as leader and chose a leftist duo instead: Norbert Walter-Borjans, a retired state minister, and Saskia Esken, a little-known Black Forest backbencher.
Their leadership honeymoon was cut short when the SPD parliamentary party ignored their main campaign promise to leave the grand coalition. Recognising their leadership limitations, with the electoral clock ticking, the duo reached out to Scholz a year ago to front the looming campaign.
While an agency was set to work on eye-catching campaign posters in a gaudy red, the party boiled down its programme debate into a snappy 64-page social justice manifesto: affordable housing, stable pensions, climate action. Regional leaders performed a ruthless clear-out of their electoral stable, replacing ageing war horses and actively recruiting younger candidates.
As the election loomed, Klingbeil set up a tight, leak-free inner team around Scholz to co-ordinate messaging and ban rhetorical solo runs. In their final move, an elegant payback for Angela Merkel’s political pickpocketing, the SPD positioned Scholz on the electoral market as her natural successor before her CDU even chose its candidate, Armin Laschet, in April.
Scholz, the chancellor’s outgoing finance minister shared her sobriety, pragmatism and reliability – according to the the SPD messaging. Voters, when they eventually realised Merkel wasn’t on the ballot, went for it.
This worked particularly well with traditional SPD voters who abandoned their squabbling party, held their nose and voted CDU to return chancellor Merkel three times.
For now, the SPD is disciplined and cohesive like never before, in pole position for power behind its de facto leader
All parties knew this election created a unique opportunity – no incumbent seeking re-election – but it was the SPD who made the most successful play for the 86 per cent of former Merkel voters who, according to one pre-election poll, planning to abandon the Merkel-less CDU.
On election day three million made good on their threat, or one in ten CDU voters: 1.5 million switched to the SPD, twice as many as went to the Greens and three times as many as defectors to the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
With campaign planning, discipline, messaging and chutzpah, the SPD, for once, left the campaign gaffes to others: Laschet laughing in a flood-wrecked town; Green candidate Annalena Baerbock’s tetchy reaction when confronted with a massaged CV and a plagiarised book.
This week in Berlin Jana Faus, of Berlin’s Pollytix strategic research group, encountered many SPD members still rubbing their eyes, amazed that they won at all.
“Their realisation, that things can succeed when they’re cohesive will linger beyond the coalition talks,” she said.
Of course the party has been here before: in 1998, the first item on the SPD’s post-election agenda was the split. Once in power its new chancellor Gerhard Schröder adopted a centrist, third way path, prompting the walkout of Oskar Lafontaine, his campaign mastermind turned leftist finance minister.
Faus and other analysts say a Schröder-Lafontaine-like rupture is unlikely this time, given a much tighter alliance between Scholz and the SPD’s leftist leadership duo, who have disciplined the party’s influential leftist camp.
Remaining challenges
Even leftist SPD enfant terrible Kevin Kühnert insisted this week his party had “overcome” infighting.
“We trust each other and decide together what we do, that’s the basis on which we won the election,” he told Der Spiegel.
As the post-election euphoria fades, even the most optimistic SPD officials admit internal challenges remain. Sunday’s result is viewed as victorious only relative to weaker rivals in a changed political landscape: two elections ago the SPD viewed a similar result as a disaster.
The coming Bundestag term brings a parliamentary party with many young – inexperienced – MPs facing a steep learning curve. And the party remains dangerously weak the further you get from Berlin, in southern and eastern Germany.
Whether last Sunday marks a turning point for Europe’s centre-left depends on the SPD maintaining its roll – and appetite for power – in difficult coalition talks starting this weekend in Berlin.
The main challenge is to reconcile a neo-liberal FDP’s abhorrence of Green big state climate transformation plans, financed by tax hikes, without sacrificing too much of the SPD’s own social justice platform.
For now, the SPD is disciplined and cohesive like never before, in pole position for power behind its de facto leader.
“Olaf Scholz once said that, ‘whoever calls on me for leadership will get it,’,” said Dr Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. “He won the election for the SPD and will remind anyone who steps out of line that they risk breaking the party again.”
