The loudspeakers overload as Bärbel Bas and Lars Klingbeil enter the foyer of the Willy Brandt House to a blurry beat. Around 400 people came to the SPD headquarters in Berlin this Saturday afternoon to listen to the words of the party leaders, which were announced as “keynote speeches”. The tinny noise of the speakers is drowned in an enthusiastic applause, to which the guests in the brightly lit hall rise as the bosses stride into the atrium.
With this picture, the leadership of the Social Democrats is starting the new year politically; they are meeting at a board meeting at the weekend. The group had already set a starting point in January, by launching a draft inheritance tax reform and provoked routine defensive reflexes from the Union’s coalition partners. SPD General Secretary Tim Klüssendorf now emphasized that the party is still concerned with “playing attack”. To this end, the SPD would like to sharpen its profile with a new basic programwhich she plans to develop in the coming months.
A lot is at stake: The last federal election ended with its worst result in history for the SPD. In nationwide surveys, the party continues to languish far behind in third place at around 15 percent – the AfD and the Union are each around ten points ahead of the Social Democrats. From a purely psychological point of view, looking ahead is probably the necessary strategy in order not to despair: an error analysis about the lost elections is very prominently missing from the speeches of the party leaders.
“We are at the beginning of a year in which we want to fight and discuss,” said Klüssendorf at party headquarters. He sees it as a sign of departure that the party has recently made gains in the polls in Rhineland-Palatinate and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – two of the five federal states in which elections are scheduled this year.
The Union of the SPD is currently also helping to sharpen its profile: With new proposals – from dental costs to the part-time debate – the conservatives are making it clear that the desired cuts to the welfare state should no longer exclusively concern those people who are already on the margins of society as recipients of citizens’ benefit or asylum seekers.
Class struggle demands from the Juso boss
Both Bas and Klingbeil deliver their speeches in a relaxed manner; rhetorical dynamics, wit and loud words are completely missing from their speeches. In terms of content, they do not present any really new ideas in their keynote speeches with which they want to shape social democracy in the next 20 years – after all, it has been that long since the SPD launched its previous keynote program, which describes Russia as a strategic partner and the Internet “along with broadcasting” as one of many forms of media that shape people’s lives.
Klüssendorf set the bar high when he compared the upcoming program process with Bad Godesberg, where the SPD explicitly turned away from its former socialist goals in 1959. This is another reason why the party leaders’ speeches may not seem like big fireworks.
In her speech, Bärbel Bas addressed the challenges arising from the concentration of power at Microsoft, Elon Musk and other tech moguls. “With platforms they don’t just make money, they exercise political power,” she said. It is up to the SPD whether innovations will result in more freedom “or the greatest division since the industrial revolution.” She did not make any specific demands such as socialization or stricter regulations for the platform economy.
Juso boss Philipp Türmer, on the other hand, called on the SPD to engage in class warfare in the Tagesspiegelafter he accused the Union of leading it too – from above. “While employees pay multiple times through duties and consumption taxes, super-rich heirs are only burdened if the tax advisor makes a mistake,” he explained. “The class struggle has long been here, now the SPD has to lead it and win.”
General foreign policy analysis by Klingbeil
Bas and Klingbeil did not address these comments from the sidelines in their speeches. A hint of struggle emerged from Bas when she demanded that the SPD’s new policy program must be “feminist”. As an example, she cited the part-time gap between working men and women and spoke of the fact that women’s underutilized workforce has a negative impact on the German business location.
In his speech, Klingbeil addressed the foreign policy challenges, but also stuck to a very general analysis. The United States is saying goodbye to the rules-based system that made it strong, he said. “Germany must become stronger and more resilient.” It is important that the SPD faces “uncomfortable questions” in the program process, he said, without going into more detail about what he means by that. “Well, what then,” a man murmurs clearly audibly in the rows of seats.
In terms of economic policy, Klingbeil suggested that the SPD should focus more on the collective. “We have talked too much about the individualization of politics and lost sight of the common good,” he says. The program process is about questioning old certainties and “radically opening up” the party to the discussions.
But that will only happen later. After the speeches, the SPD leaders said goodbye to general applause and without discussion in order to continue the retreat in the narrow circle of the party leadership.