Marco Bülow was in the Bundestag for 19 years. He was elected directly in Dortmund on the SPD ticket. The constituency was a safe bet. Being directly elected means being more responsible to the constituency than to the party – and not having to be maneuvered by the party into a promising place on the list.
Bülow was an SPD leftist, he was committed to opposing lobby influence in the Bundestag and promoting eco-social change. After a few years, he was considered a perpetual left-wing rebel in the group. He was a stubborn, lively spirit who chafed against the grand coalition. The compromises that the SPD, the eternal ruling party, made there as a junior partner seemed all too painful to him.
In 2007 he wrote: “The VAT increase, the health care reform, the pension at 67, which primarily affects employees, and finally the reduction in corporate tax – I can no longer see a balanced social policy in the combination. At a group meeting I once said that I could no longer reconcile these decisions with my conscience. It became quieter in the room, which usually only happens when a minister or the group leader speaks. But no one responded.”
A good ten years later, Bülow left the SPD. At that time he was also considered a solitary figure in the left wing. According to Bülow’s criticism, the SPD had become “arbitrary in the grand coalition, with no discernible stance.” Instead of defending its ideals, the party blindly follows power. His resignation was a sharp reckoning with social democratic pragmatism, the vice-like logic of the lesser evil, and an empty-headed ethic of responsibility that Max Weber might also have criticized.
For Weber, the key witness of the ethics of responsibility, the ethics of conviction also plays a central role – it is the only thing that prevents politics from degenerating into managing the status quo because of all the responsibility. That’s exactly what Bülow saw in the SPD parliamentary group in 2018. It had become a machine that only managed with a lack of ideas and whose potential to want more had withered in the engine room of power.
Homeless since leaving
This analysis was not wrong. As harsh as Bülow’s judgment was, the umbilical cord cutting was painful. It was difficult for him. Even when he left, he sometimes involuntarily spoke of “we”. Here the power apparatus, there the lonely left-wing moralist who despairs of the logical logic – at some point this tension was too much. But it defined his role.
Only a few left-wing SPD dissidents found a productive, new role elsewhere after leaving. Bülow’s search for a new home was crowned with little success. He did not want to join the Left Party, which spiraled into a deep, depressing crisis after 2018. He took part Wagenknecht’s stand-up project, which flopped.
In 2020 he joined “The Party”. and got almost nine percent of first votes in Dortmund in 2021. That was a respectable success. The failure of his post-SPD career did not mask it. Politically, he appeared homeless after leaving the SPD.
As it was announced on Friday, Marco Bülow died in January at the age of just 54 after a long illness.