European elections turn into a defeat for the SPD: Scholz does not pull

OPINION

SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert said something remarkable on election night: Olaf Scholz is “part of our overall line-up.” This is about as rousing in terms of language as the SPD’s entire election campaign. It is an involuntary admission that the Chancellor is no longer seen as an outstanding personality among the Social Democrats. And it sounds like an announcement that Scholz will have to take his place among his comrades after this horrific election result. It is just not yet clear for what purpose: should he be protected, patronized or taken out of the game?

The SPD tried to run a chancellor election campaign and failed miserably. They printed Olaf Scholz on the posters and declared the European elections to be a kind of interim assessment of the chancellor. That was a tactical error. Because this assessment looks disastrous for all to see: For the first time in a nationwide election, the SPD is behind the AfD and is losing massively to Sahra Wagenknecht. Prudence and peace, the slogans for Scholz’s foreign policy that he is so proud of, did not work. And there is no consolation to be found in the government alliance either: all three parties in the traffic light coalition together just barely surpassed the Union’s result.

Olaf Scholz does not move

Olaf Scholz is not pulling any weight, even if his supporters will say that without him the colourless top candidate Katarina Barley would have done even worse. In truth, the result of the test run with the focus on the person of the Chancellor allows only one conclusion: As of today, Scholz is so weak that the Union could even avoid a federal election. despite Friedrich Merz wins – and the SPD because of of the Chancellor.

What now? The CDU has brought up a vote of confidence and new elections. This is as understandable as it is pointless. Coalitions do not break up under pressure from outside, they crumble because of a lack of internal cohesion. And a governing party does not sacrifice its leader in one fell swoop, it gradually withdraws its trust from him. That is how it ended in the SPD with Gerhard Schröder and also with Helmut Schmidt.

The coalition will continue for now. The SPD has no other choice because anything else would mean losing power. After the European election results, the Greens also have no reason to expect anything from new elections. For them, the party of Foreign Ministers Joschka Fischer and Annalena Baerbock, it is a shock that even in a European election, frustration with the Green government’s performance is so clearly overwhelming – and that lowering the voting age to 16 has apparently backfired because the Greens have become uncool among voters under 30. Finally, the FDP, which has always been the declared shaky link in the traffic light coalition, can just about gloss over its weak result so that there is no immediate reason to turn out the lights.

But the possibility of a break-up still looms over this coalition. And after two and a half years of not being able to create a sense of unity, it is a mystery how this will work in a situation in which each of the three parties will now be thinking primarily of itself, and in a budgetary situation in which compromises must be the top priority.