The SPD is under pressure – and makes a “boring offer”

Kevin Kühnert is wearing shorts and has rolled up his shirt sleeves. It is just under 30 degrees in the shade and the grill on which the free sausages are turned is right next to him. But the SPD general secretary has to get through it.

After all, it is the last day of his tour through Thuringia. He has been to Greiz, Ronneburg, Themar, Ilmenau and Altenburg. Now, for the finale, he is at the Wenigemarkt in Erfurt, the state capital, where the state parliament is located – and from which the SPD could be thrown out on September 1st.

The state election, says Kühnert, is not a “vote on world peace” or a “referendum on Berlin”. The SPD is fighting for more teachers in schools and free meals in kindergartens. “We are the anti-populists,” he says. “We are the ones who make a boring offer. Make a boring voting decision!”

Does this sound like desperation?

In any case, things are not looking good for the SPD in Thuringia. The polls now put it at 6 percent, and the trend is falling. In the neighboring state of Saxony, where the state parliament will also be elected on September 1, it is also only at 6 percent. That is the death zone.

Even within the SPD, it is no longer considered impossible that the party will be crushed in the escalating three-way battle between the CDU, AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) alliance and slip below the 5 percent hurdle. Then the party would no longer be represented in parliament for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic – and this in the two states in which it was founded around 160 years ago.

This is a dramatic situation ahead of the state elections. If the SPD is thrown out of one or even two parliaments, the familiar questions will become even more urgent. Is Olaf Scholz, the unpopular chancellor, still the right person for the 2025 federal election? And will it still work in the dysfunctional traffic light coalition? A lot of things could then go wrong in Berlin.

“Otherwise I see not only black for Saxony, but also blue”

Nobody is likely to feel this pressure more than Petra Köpping. After the election in Saxony, she could be seen as the savior of the SPD – or as the one who led her party into a historic embarrassment. Köpping is the social affairs minister in the Saxon Kenya coalition with the CDU and the Greens and is also responsible for “social cohesion”. Now, as the SPD’s top candidate, she has to keep her own shop together.

She has been travelling through Saxony with her message for months. “We need reliable conditions in Saxony,” Köpping told the campaigners at a party event in Leipzig at the start of the election campaign. Things won’t get any easier after the local elections, Köpping warned, as there are also European and state elections coming up.

Reliable conditions: By this, Köpping means an SPD that can be relied upon in turbulent times. “Otherwise, I see not only black for Saxony, but also blue,” says Köpping, with the party colors of the CDU and AfD in mind.

The strategy did not work in the European and local elections in June. The Social Democrats ended up behind the CDU and AfD – in Saxony and Thuringia, but also in Brandenburg, where the SPD has the Prime Minister. A new state parliament will be elected here on September 22nd.

The disaster had a bitter twist. Even the new BSW overtook the SPD without exception. More than half a million former SPD voters switched to the Wagenknecht coalition in the EU elections; no other party attracted more people. With its left-right combination – socially left, socially right – it is going to the core of its comrades. With its populist concept of peace, it is capturing disappointed Social Democrats who want their party to put a clearer emphasis on peace in its Ukraine policy.

Can a demonstratively “boring offer”, as made by Secretary General Kühnert, be a profitable answer?

At the tour finale in Thuringia, the Secretary General is exercising his optimism. “The mood is better than the polls suggest,” he told the starThe party is using its proximity to the 5 percent hurdle as additional motivation. In addition, the discussions he has had with voters have rarely been about war and peace.

SPD under pressure

But it’s not that simple. On the one hand, the topic is considered important in surveys. On the other hand, the AfD and BSW are doing everything they can to put it at the center of the debate.

Just as Olaf Scholz played the role of both the head of government for a new era and the chancellor of peace during the European election campaign, the SPD is now trying to do a balancing act. This reads like the latest decision by the Federal Presidium on the planned stationing of US missiles in Germany: “As the SPD, we take responsibility for ensuring that no child born in Germany today has to experience war again.” The additional long-range weapons are “an important building block for this.”

Diplomatic weight from military strength – that may be the only language that the warmonger from the Kremlin understands. But it does not really resonate with voters in East Germany. In the eyes of his critics, the Chancellor does not adequately explain his far-reaching decisions, such as the missile plans. Possibly with the intention of not fuelling fears of an escalation of the war. According to the motto: I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.

But with this style of communication, Scholz is reaching fewer and fewer people. If they come at all.

In mid-July in Dresden, the SPD invited people to the Schlossplatz to kick off the election campaign. The rows of chairs remained largely empty at first. Instead, a group of around 50 counter-demonstrators had gathered on the other side, most of them from the right-wing extremist “Free Saxony”. They drummed, shouted and disrupted the situation for three hours.

When Scholz takes the stage at the climax of the two-hour program, the number of listeners has grown to around 70, but there are still some empty chairs. Instead, several hundred passers-by are listening beyond the barriers. Despite an explicit invitation from the organizers, they did not want to come into the audience area, preferring to keep their distance, always ready to quickly turn away and walk away.

This is just a snapshot, of course. What matters is what happens at the ballot box. The fact that trends and polls can change at the last minute has been proven not only by a number of state elections. In the 2021 federal election, a candidate who had been written off several times also came out on top: Olaf Scholz. Compared to his competitors in the voting booth, Germans suddenly considered him the safest bet. Why shouldn’t this also work for the SPD in East Germany, which is positioning itself as a serious alternative to the populists of the AfD and BSW?

But the CDU, which is pushing back into the state chancellery in Dresden and Erfurt, is still there. It senses the weakness of the SPD, especially on the issue of peace, and is already making itself look good for the BSW. Not only the Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, but also the Thuringian CDU leader Mario Voigt almost sound like Wagenknecht when it comes to the Ukraine war.

This increases the pressure on the SPD, which has always been needed to govern recently – and could now be replaced by the Left Party splinter group. Or could it?

Question to the Secretary General: What would happen if the SPD were needed for a CDU-BSW government? “That is not a wish!”, answers Kühnert. “Nothing will work with the AfD, because they are fascists.” And with the BSW, too, “nothing should work if possible, because they are populists.” But: “We cannot rule anything out.”

In any case, these state elections will not be boring.