Opinion of the SPD: Electoral for Klingbeil – the disruption is missing

The worm must taste good for the fish, not the angler. This also applies in a figurative sense to party days. The speeches there do not have to fall to the media representatives who dissect the person said coldly. But the delegates.

Seen in this way, the SPD leadership can consider the opening of its federal party convention to be reasonably successful. The new party chairman Bärbel BAS was elected to office with a strong 95 percent. Lars Klingbeil, on the other hand, received a violent memorial: he only got almost 65 percent.

That may be a disgrace for him personally. As a party chairman, Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister, he has a legislature to breathe away. The real problem of his party (and with it also of his) will not solve this. This was also shown by the opening day of the party congress.

Previously, Bärbel Bas and Lars Klingbeil had been banging along the party presidency for the party chairmanship of core social democratic terms. Ascent through education, politics for the weakest, fight against right and racism.

That succeeded more, sometimes less elegant. Bärbel Bas had a double advantage. On the one hand, she was able to play the women’s card, compassion with the sawn-out ex-Co chairman Saskia Esken and at the same time combine this with another social democratic mantra (“solidarity”). On the other hand, the bad result for the SPD does not go home with her in the Bundestag election, but with Lars Klingbeil.

That is why it also followed a humble tone. Spoke of a “catastrophic result of February 23” that “you couldn’t put away”. Of “mistakes”, “responsibility” and “self -criticism”. And then only followed vague formulations: “We weren’t fully there.”

Despite the election debacle, he justified his grip on the parliamentary group chairmanship that he wanted to negotiate a government “at eye level with Friedrich Merz” to get “the best” for his party. Söder format has to present power struts as a samaritarian self-defense.

After all, Klingbeil did not even try to say that he only allowed the aggressive displacement process of his co-chairman for a long time and then also refused a ministerial office. Instead, he also left it with the vague hint that “many would have no idea” how it really is “.

What both BAS and Klingbeil missed: a serious thinking about what actually went wrong. And above all, visions of how the party shrunk to 16 percent can reinvent itself.

There were other comrades who sought to fill this gap in the pronunciation following the application speeches. Philipp Türmer, for example. “After February 23, our greatest enemy is normal,” called the Juso boss outraged by the podium and asked his party not to be satisfied with “small success” and not “to celebrate the small compromises”.

Türmer’s response to the SPD’s question of existence (redistribution) may consider many to be wrong. But the right assumption behind it should be correct that the SPD will be finally lost without disruption.

Floscious Social Democrat Romanticism may still work on party conferences. But it no longer works outside. The weekly surveys show this.

Which brings us back to the angler. In the end, its worm does not have to taste the delegate. But the voters.