Klingbeil’s SPD staff: It happens what should no longer happen

Lovers of political hypocrisy should paint the SPD party conference in June in the calendar. You shouldn’t miss that: Party leader Lars Klingbeil will have to get worthy words to say goodbye to his co-chair. Saskia Esken in turn becomes silent, at least in the way it was dumped. So is politics. Power struggles, winners, losers-that is part of it, but also the urge to pour everything with instant harmony.

The reorganization of the SPD leadership is the reunification of a tragic comedy that the party has ever experienced when Andrea Nahles fled from politics in 2019. Today’s party leader Lars Klingbeil was a general secretary at the time and likes to say that the circumstances had made him so affected that he did not want to experience it as party leader again. You can only say: Congratulations, that worked out really well in the Esken case.

As for the dramas on their management, the SPD has two problems: the first is the men. And the second the women. Lars Klingbeil is at the top of the first problem. The soil -looking low -saxon has conquered the tip, from where it now has or grants political influence. Klingbeil has created what was called a Buberl area at Sebastian Kurz: loyal men in important positions at Sebastian Kurz. Of course: The pure number of women in the cabinet is evading every criticism. But they all owe their offices to their benevolence.

Klingbeil is in the tradition of his teachers. Gerhard Schröder also had quite a few women around, but his government dominated men like Otto Schily, Franz Müntefering and Joschka Fischer. However, many SPD women of the Schröder period have remembered because the chancellor is said to have found them annoying and exhausting. It started with A like Andrea Nahles, ranging from Edelgard Bulmahn to Herta Däubler-Gmelin to Z as Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zzeil. Only a few prime ministers succeeded on their own and knew very well why they kept their distance from the Federal SPD.

It was only when five other men maneuvered the SPD cart in the dirt after Schröder that Andrea Nahles was allowed to go to the party leader-and failed. In itself, of course, on the men, but not least to women. Like Esken now too.

Because the second problem of the SPD is their women, who put up with everything. You can find Saskia Esken well or bad or something. But like Andrea Nahles in the crucial arguments, she too could not count on one thing: the solidarity of women when it was blasphemed over them at the front and back. Yes, a couple have registered, the chairwoman of the women’s working group, for example, which is roughly as well known as the CDU chairman in the Schaumburg district association. But the women with influence in the SPD let the abdominal debate run.

But now Bärbel Bas is coming! True. However, the future chairman does not refute the thesis of the male-knot structures of the SPD, but confirms them: Because BAS is only where it is today, because even the SPD men in 2021 understood in the last second that they could not divide the three most important offices-Federal President, Federal Chancellor-among themselves. So BAS came into office. Incidentally, the women had defended themselves once.