Schröder and the SPD: just a slip?

The SPD cleans up.

And in the corners where a lot of rubbish has been collecting for almost twenty years - at least that's how the party itself sees it. Because it is cleaning up with the Schröder era and is just finishing with the Agenda reforms and Hartz IV there will soon be a citizen's income, it should be funded more and demanded less.

That was the sentence that the then Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder coined in 2002.

And can it be a coincidence that these days Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil Hartz IV is buried?

So far, however, the SPD has not thrown its first chancellor since Helmut Schmidt out of the party.

On Monday, the arbitration commission of the SPD sub-district in Hanover saw no reason to reprimand the former party leader or even to expel him from the party.

The committee found that there was no violation of party rules.

But even if Schröder stays: The SPD, now the chancellor's party again, wants to be a completely different one than it was between 1998 and 2005. Is that fair?

And is that politically wise?

The first question is one of style and propriety, it is not the crucial one.

But the second question is about the future.

After the end of Schröder's chancellorship, the SPD developed enormous powers of self-destruction.

This force of self-anger was evident again in the past few weeks when dealing with Schröder.

It's a belated cleanup.

Because the SPD had to hand over the chancellorship to the CDU in 2005, but they also had to have a say in government.

The SPD did not experience the kind of unleashing experienced by many parties after it switched to the opposition.

Nothing was sacred to the grandchildren

Nothing was sacred to Willy Brandt's "grandchildren's generation", which also included Schröder.

The party served her primarily as an instrument to satisfy her ambition.

It's not nice, but it was successful in the end.

The generation after him had to live with the taboos of the lusty provocateur Gerhard Schröder – Steinmeier, Nahles, Heil, Scholz.

Against the political martial artist Schröder, Scholz looks even narrower and braver.

The incarnate counter-proposal.

The circumstances under which the two made it into the Chancellery are not that different.

And that's why the SPD should be careful how they deal with their legacy.

In 1998, a social feeling prepared the way for Schröder's election victory: the middle class's fear of social decline.

The time of deregulation and individual responsibility seemed to be over, and there was a great desire among many for a renaissance of the caring welfare state.

As a result, the traditional messages of the social democrats were suddenly in demand again.

The great integrator

Scholz experienced something similar in the 2021 federal election campaign.

He had to deal with the problem that although the promise of education had been kept in many places, those who didn't want to or couldn't advance were forgotten.

For this reason, the SPD promised to build 400,000 apartments and wrote "respect" in large letters on their election posters, along the lines of: You are good the way you are.

Most recently, the great integrator Schröder was able to convey this feeling to people.

Like Schröder, Scholz also aimed at the border layers between the Union and the SPD.

He realized that while people were kind of in favor of change and innovation, they were also afraid.

Like 1998.

During the chancellorship, of course, many things turned out very differently.

Under Schröder, the SPD broke with several social democratic ideas.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 demanded a strict domestic policy and deployments of the Bundeswehr abroad.

And the high unemployment is Agenda 2010. The break that Scholz has to make as a result of the Ukraine war is even greater.

The SPD as a peace party with great love for Moscow - that's over.

As before, many social activists now stand ideologically naked.

The certainty about the future that was always so important for the SPD no longer exists.

Only Nixon could go to China, only Schröder could turn the labor market upside down, only Scholz could announce the turning point.

Schröder's reforms were necessary, but his own people were running away from him.

Also because the officials happily participated in the self-torture.

Chancellor Scholz can still assume that his party will support the U-turn in security and Russia policy.

But she also has to draw lessons from the past on how to build on this heritage.