The Willy Brandt House recently arranged for the Gerhard Schröder mug to be removed from the SPD shop.

They also looked to see if there was still a Schröder autograph card somewhere in the publicly accessible showcases in the party headquarters.

Nothing was found, to everyone's relief.

The SPD has provided the chancellor four times in the history of the Federal Republic and is now trying to cut all ties to one.

But the Schröder phenomenon will not vanish into thin air through iconoclasm.

A former chancellor remains a former chancellor for life.

And he represents Germany – in one way or another.

The party leadership is trying desperately not to let it become an ideological problem in order to obscure the wider ideological errors in the matter of Russia.

People act as if Schröder were a shady businessman with dubious connections to the criminal Russian leadership, who also happens to be a member of the SPD.

But Schröder is not a private individual.

It wasn't him when he became chairman of the supervisory board at Nord Stream AG just a few days after Merkel took office.

Nor was he when he criticized Annalena Baerbock for her critical attitude to the gas pipeline when Scholz was elected Chancellor on television.

Not many were bothered by his Russian deals

When General Secretary Kühnert says that Schröder does not understand Putin, but understands the ruble, he trivializes Schröder's work and is already working on the SPD's next illusion.

Because Schröder liked the money, but also Putin, and he wasn't alone in the SPD, in German politics in general.

The will to clarify, especially in the SPD, is currently alarmingly low.

Instead, the Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania compares her commitment to Putin's tube with Willy Brandt's for Ostpolitik, and nobody in the party disagrees.

Brandt didn't deserve that, and neither did German social democracy.

Schröder was the SPD's torment during, but especially after, his chancellorship.

On the one hand, this was due to the fact that the party had always struggled with pragmatic power-seekers.

On the other hand, she rejected Schröder's Hartz reforms and therefore blamed him for the decline of the party.

Schröder was unloved for a long time, but not because of his business in Russia.

Some comrades expressed incomprehension about the rapid and close ties with Putin.

But actually most of them didn't care that much.

Asked as a democratic populist

Above all, nobody was bothered when the party and the former chancellor got closer again in recent years.

His greatest merit was the no to the Iraq war.

In doing so, he fueled a general skepticism about the United States in the party and the desire for more harmony with Russia.

The SPD chairmen had kept in touch with him anyway.

The Merkel challengers Steinmeier, Steinbrück and Schulz relied on his campaign help.

When the AfD rose in the wake of the refugee crisis, Schröder was in demand again.

He was seen as a democratic populist, as a populist of the center, with whose means one could get at the AfD.

Even Andrea Nahles, whose relationship with Schröder was difficult, praised him at the time.

He enjoyed the cuddles of his party.

Politics as a martial art

That is why the real proletarian Schröder will not voluntarily give up his party membership, as Chairman Esken would like.

Schröder may well believe that he still embodies more social democracy than the entire current party leadership put together, even if his actions and attitudes towards Russia mock that.

Schröder's ruthless and cunning fight for his own interests, and thus also for Putin's, shows a quality that many voters used to appreciate: one practices politics as a martial art.

Schröder took moods and made them his own.

He made politics as if there were federal elections every Sunday.

He was a walking contradiction and thus emphasized what connects, whereas today SPD politicians emphasize what separates.

This was at the expense of the program, but it brought majorities.

Even with his defeat in 2005, his election result was ten percentage points above that of Scholz in 2021.

The SPD has to work through its mistakes

No party could wish for someone like Schröder.

The SPD will have to conduct an exclusion procedure against him.

No matter what the outcome, the SPD's lifelong lies in foreign policy will not go away with Schröder.

But on the contrary.

It could serve as a justification for leaving it at that part of coming to terms with the past.

But the party has to work through its mistakes.

She shies away from it.

Because then no stone will be left unturned.