display
The behavior of the party chairman Saskia Esken and her deputy Kevin Kühnert towards the former Vice President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, continues to meet with sharp criticism within the SPD.
The historian and eldest son of the former Federal Chancellor and SPD chairman Willy Brandt, Peter Brandt, accuses Esken and Kühnert of “failure” in a guest article.
The background to the harsh criticism are statements by Esken and Kühnert in an internal party email, in which they had shown themselves to be “ashamed” of “lack of sensitivity” on the part of “backward-looking” comrades in dealing with “queer people”.
This apparently also meant Wolfgang Thierse, who in his own guest contribution had criticized the claim of sexual and other minorities to define what is right and possibly unbearable for them based on their identity, instead of exposing himself to open and controversial arguments about it.
Thierse worried about the cohesion of the community and developed an offer for a minimum consensus within the social democracy, writes Brandt together with the publisher and chairman of the Karl Schiller Foundation, Detlef Prinz.
display
In normal times, a sovereign party leadership would have invited to a discussion on neutral ground and would have offered the protagonists a thoroughly arguable platform to exchange ideas civilly about what actually holds our democratic community together: namely the willingness to see through the eyes of the other.
That could have been the prelude to a debate - initiated by the SPD - write Brandt and Prinz, in which the focus is not on exclusion in the sense of the so-called "Cancel Culture", but on the question of what social democrats actually have in common vis-à-vis them that really threatened this democracy.
The fact that a party chairman and her deputy let it get this far instead of simply apologizing because in their "shame" towards Thierse actually distanced themselves from a considerable part of the SPD members, points to the core of the superfluous dispute.
And it shows that the SPD lacks a political compass, criticize Brandt and Prinz.
The party is not in a position to politically manage a debate conflict.