Stephan Weil’s resignation: People like him are missing the SPD

Actually, the SPD can hardly do without types like him. Down -to -earth, popular, successful. From May she will have to. After twelve years as head of government, Stephan Weil has enough: “I’m 66 years old and I notice that too,” said Weil on Tuesday when he announced his resignation. The office is challenging and demanding. At the same time, he found the last Bundestag election campaign particularly strenuous. His doctor also agreed, reported Weil, who frankly admitted to sleep disorders. Because the conclusion: “I have the impression that it is time to take shorter.”

In May, the 66-year-old gave up the office of Prime Minister and the SPD state chair in Lower Saxony to Olaf Lies, the previous Minister of Economy. It is a cut for the state of Lower Saxony, which will also have an impact on the SPD in the federal government. Because even though one makes a place, the rooms are getting tighter for others.

Stephan Weil liked to give himself as a stink -abnormal guy. When the virtues that the native of Hamburg noticed from home, he called decency, modesty, solidarity with the weaker and sense of responsibility. His career was straight, not very exciting, but successful. At work: lawyer, prosecutor, judge. In politics: treasurer, mayor, prime minister. “I’m just a simple, beer -drinking lawyer,” he once said about himself. But that’s just a part of the truth.

Stephan Weil is definitely a man with a sense of power and the feeling for the right time. As a local politician, he had built up a dense network at an early stage. This also helped him to assert himself in a member decision by the SPD in 2011 via the top candidate for the state elections. At that time he defeated the man whom he now wants to pass on the office of prime minister. Olaf Lies also returns to the party chair, which he has already held, but then left Stephan Weil to strengthen his position. So it can also be in the SPD, the other places, especially in the federal government, in recent years. From the competitive situation of back then, so because on Tuesday, a friendship had become a friendship.

As Prime Minister, Weil was a politician to touch the proximity to the citizens. He invented a dialogue format (“on a word”), in which his guests could write their questions on the back of a beer lid, which helped them overcome the distance. After 2013, his unexcited, described by some too simply described as boring, not only enabled him to govern with only one voice in a red-green coalition, but also a government with the CDU from 2017 after a tough election campaign. That was a “coalition of reason and common sense,” said Weil at the time. With him, such a sentence was always more than a phrase. He was serious. Nevertheless, after the next election, he moved to the Greens again.

The fact that he is capable of hardness showed because even when it comes to new occupations on the Board of Directors from Volkswagen to the exhaust gas scandal, which he influenced significantly. The group is the heart of the Lower Saxony economy, the country holds 20 percent of the shares. Every prime minister sits Qua’s office on the supervisory board and knows that if VW does not run, the whole country suffers.

Weil’s voice also had weight in the round of the prime ministers. Most recently, he was the head of government with the third longest term behind Reiner Haseloff and Winfried Kretschmann. In the countless night sessions of the Prime Minister conference in the Corona period, because some skirmishes with Chancellor Angela Merkel and was always happy when he could return to Hanover again. Already as because of the SPD chair in 2019, he had waved off. The Berlin political company was not for him, it was because of the full conviction.

His relationship with Olaf Scholz is considered to be distant professionally. “North German men don’t fall around his neck continuously,” he said once. Especially in refugee policy and their financial effects, because and Scholz sometimes and Scholz sometimes represented opposite interests. Nevertheless, it was never illoyally. In general, he was always a total failure for journalists as a source of nasty quotes against party friends.

Olaf Lies, 57, successor after twelve years in waiting, is popular in the party. He called him “a top performer of state politics” on Tuesday. With Lies’ career jump it is also clear that it is gradually becoming tight for Hubertus Heil. Because it can be expected that the Lower Saxony Lars Klingbeil and Boris Pistorius are set as a minister in a grand coalition in Berlin, there should be no place at the cabinet table for the previous Minister of Social Affairs. Therefore, the variant by Berlin lasted that Heil could switch to the state chancellery in Lower Saxony. This path, if it has been more than a theoretical consideration, is now also installed.