The Pioneer Klartext tour lived up to its name last night. The former Foreign Secretary, ex-Vice Chancellor and former SPDIn an interview with Chelsea Spieker in Essen, leader Sigmar Gabriel made clear comments about the state of his party.
After the SPD’s defeat in the European elections, the party did not need a vote of confidence in the Bundestag, but rather a new Bad Godesberg – when the SPD broke away from Marxism in 1959, committed itself to a market economy and thus paved the way for chancellorship of Willy Brandt.
Advertisement
Gabriel literally:
“The SPD needs a new Godesberg. She has to think about why she has lost contact with the population. The social issues are different from the everyday discussion about distribution.”
Today’s social democracy needs reforms, both substantively and in terms of personnel
Gabriel listed the issues at the top of the agenda of social democratic voters today:
“In terms of domestic policy, the SPD has not changed its priorities at all, although the concerns of the population have become completely different: inflation, migration, crime.”
Today’s social democracy needs reforms, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of personnel. During the TV round with all party leaders after the European elections, SPD leader Lars Klingbeil spoke out against the AfD and their party leader Alice Weidel, calling them ‘Nazis’. For Gabriel, this rhetoric is above all one thing: ‘nonsense’. Literal:
“It is of course nonsense to label the party, and especially its voters, as Nazis. Many of them used to vote for the SPD, so they couldn’t have been Nazis. There must be other reasons for their voting decision.”
Gabriel criticizes the SPD’s election campaign ‘against the right’
Gabriel discussed the election campaign of the Willy Brandt House, where they had relied on a campaign “against the right”:
“The SPD should ask itself the question: why is it running an election campaign with the headline ‘against the right’? And the result is: the right-wing populists are stronger than ever and the SPD is weaker than ever.”
The content does not correspond to the voters’ agenda:
“Constantly expanding the welfare state and spending more money on it: if that were a benchmark for getting votes, the SPD would have to have a two-thirds majority.”
Secretary-General Kevin Kühnert in particular has been criticized. According to Gabriel, the main culprit is not Kühnert, but those who hired “someone without political experience” to lead the election campaign:
“When you hire someone, not only does the person you hire have the responsibility to do the job well, but you also have to consider whether you are giving the job to someone who can do it.”
And further:
“I don’t mean that ironically or in a bad way. In one of the most difficult phases of German and European politics is hiring someone without any political experience who can turn a party conference upside down, and who thought that turning a party conference upside down is the same as giving such a task of governing the republic. This can only go wrong. . I would not criticize Kevin Kühnert, but rather those who assigned him this task. That was an extreme of what he can do.”
“That’s not how it works at parties”
Gabriel does not believe that Olaf Scholz will ask the question of trust. “That’s not how things work at parties,” he explained yesterday at a sold-out variety theater in Essen. Failed candidates are also kept there for internal party reasons:
“I don’t think that the SPD would say to a chancellor shortly before the federal elections: Man, Olaf, it was stupid somehow. We’ll take someone else. That’s not how it works at parties.”
According to Gabriel’s prediction, the SPD, like other parties before it, will continue to support the Chancellor even in a desperate situation:
“Parties then come to an end. That’s just how it is. That’s called democracy.”
Advertisement
Conclusion: The SPD leadership does not have to like the statements of its former party leader, but it must be aware of them. Or to say it with Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the “General German Workers’ Association” and therefore the predecessor of the SPD:
“All great political action consists of saying what is. All political pettiness consists in concealing and disguising what is.”