As a reaction to the defeat in the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, the SPD is now putting social issues ahead of military issues. Apart from the impending costs – in Düsseldorf, a counter-model to the Berlin coalition will soon be on display: Olaf Scholz’s life is becoming more difficult.
From now on, the SPD wants, that is their reaction to the big defeat in the “small federal election”, to talk less about weapons and more about social issues. More about higher pensions, more about announced projects such as basic child security and citizen benefits.
The postponement of Olaf Scholz’s “Zeitenwende” project fits in with this. The Chancellor reacted to the start of the Ukraine war by announcing that he would invest 100 billion euros in the German armed forces. The adoption of this security package, planned for this Friday, has been postponed for the time being because the SPD cannot bring itself to invest all the money, which it would prefer to invest in social projects, exclusively in fighter bombers and smoothbore guns.
The postponement of the chancellor’s trip to Ukraine by the chancellor himself also fits in with this. Nothing will be formally postponed, as there is no travel date. But there is a new reason not to go to Volodymyr Zelenskyj, at least not now. According to Scholz on “RTL”, it shouldn’t just be a “photo session”, on such an occasion you have to talk about concrete things.
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Let’s say it carefully: Scholz pulled that out with his sparse hair. So far, the chancellor has primarily prevented himself from talking about concrete things. Selenskyj would very much like to talk very concretely – about how useful German tanks like “Marder” and German “Leopards” would be for wartime events in his country . Selenskyj could also ask the uncomfortable question for Scholz, which is why the Federal Security Council led by the Chancellor has not yet decided on the delivery.
The communicatively robust Minister of Social Affairs, Hubertus Heil, contested the government survey on Wednesday when the social SPD brand core was used to process the election. Appropriately, Heil comes from Lower Saxony, where the next state elections are due on October 9th. It is helpful that things are looking better for the SPD there than in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Apropos: The SPD is trying to keep a traffic light coalition in Düsseldorf based on the Berlin model in play, albeit not as aggressively as Kevin Kühnert on the black Sunday of the election and the day after with “Hart, aber fair”. Scholz said on the SPD board that this possibility finally exists, which is arithmetically correct, but no longer politically since Christian Lindner took it out of the game.
The FDP chairman knows bourgeois expectations of decency. A traffic light government in Düsseldorf, formed by two electoral losers, the SPD and the FDP, has “no internal legitimacy”. Which means: An alliance of SPD, Greens and FDP is only an option if the black-green coalition negotiations fail.
What makes black and green so dangerous for Scholz in the largest German state is the socio-demographics. Black-Green is an alliance of country and city, of old and young. Cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants, such as Cologne, are practically lost for the Union, there is a clear green-red dominance here. In return, the CDU takes the rural areas, in North Rhine-Westphalia areas such as the Siegerland, the Lower Rhine, the Münsterland.
The next bad news for the SPD is the low turnout. The older and the better educated the people are and the fewer people have a migration background, the higher the voter turnout. In these groups, approval of the CDU is traditionally high.
In migrant underprivileged areas that are neither CDU-affine nor green-leaning, turnout on this sunny election day was low. This applies to the traditionally social-democratic Ruhr area. In the north of Essen, for example, notorious as a clan country, turnout was a horrid 30 percent.
In other words, black-green is not only a zeitgeist-compliant alliance, but also one that is supported by demographics. A coalition of old and new conservative-liberal values. An alliance of old and new bourgeoisie. A model, then – and thus an alternative to the traffic light government, in which three partners have laboriously found each other who tend not to fit together. And who, as Christian Lindner coolly remarks, work together out of “national political” responsibility.
And the upper liberal stated even more coolly that the traffic light had never been “our dream”. Bad news for traffic light boss Olaf Scholz. The Düsseldorf counter-model is to be launched in North Rhine-Westphalia before the summer holidays, possibly at the end of June, according to people close to Hendrik Wüst, the old and probably new prime minister.
A counter-model plus new bad news: Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht has now also been charged with leaking secrets – in connection with her son’s helicopter flight. According to “Pioneer”, one or more violations of the strict safety precautions that apply on such occasions are said to have occurred. Chancellor Scholz and SPD leader Klingbeil only expressed their confidence in the badly battered Social Democratic minister at the weekend.
Bottom line: Self-confident Greens, nervous Liberals, Social Democrats looking for identity. Problems with top staff. Olaf Scholz no longer leads a “progress coalition” but is in charge of a frantically trembling “flashing traffic light”.
Further prospects: rather uncertain.
