The most consequential disputes within politics are often those that take place inside political parties, not between them. In Germany, such internal ruptures are very rare. The last big one occurred in 1959, when the Social Democratic Party (SPD) broke with Marxism and turned itself into one of Europe’s most successful centre-left parties. The SPD could be on the brink of another such shift, but this time the forces of resistance are more formidable.
A group of eminent German historians, all members of the SPD, have written an open letter to criticise the party’s refusal to distance itself from Vladimir Putin and for failing to support Ukraine. The best known of those historians is Heinrich August Winkler, author of the two-volume history The Long Road West, spanning the period from the French Revolution to German unification. The book’s title contrasts with the SPD’s own direction of travel since its Bad Godesberg party conference in 1959. Starting with the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt, the SPD has been increasingly looking eastward by turning itself into the party of the German-Russian relationship.
No one in the SPD personified that more than Gerhard Schröder, chancellor from 1998 to 2005, and a personal friend of Putin. After he left office, Schröder became Putin’s main lobbyist in Berlin. He is still roaming the airwaves. In an interview with Germany’s DPA news agency on 28 March, he offered himself as a mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war on the grounds that he had worked successfully with Putin for many years.
After Russia’s invasion in 2022, some former SPD chiefs changed their position, such as Sigmar Gabriel or Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president. One who did not is the SPD’s leader in the Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich. He recently caused an uproar by saying he wanted to “freeze” the war in Ukraine, as he put it. Mützenich appears to suggest that the main obstacle to peace is Western support for Ukraine. I struggle to see how Ukraine can liberate all of the occupied territories given current levels of Western support – but even “freezing” the war on the basis of current battle lines would require a stepping up of Western military support far beyond what Mützenich and other Social Democrats would tolerate. Mützenich’s call to freeze the conflict is cynical. He is tapping in to a deep German angst about Russia.
Polls on German attitudes have shown a weakening public support for weapons deliveries to Ukraine, especially long-range missiles. That hesitancy is currently being echoed by the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and by a new party of the left, founded by Sahra Wagenknecht. Born in East Germany, Wagenknecht was one of the most prominent members of the Left Party before she formally quit last year. She is arguably one of the most gifted orators in German politics. She draws some of her support from SPD voters. Mützenich and his SPD, then, are trying to regain voters they are losing to the radical parties.
Olaf Scholz himself was never part of the SPD’s pro-Russia gang. On 27 February 2022, just after Russia’s invasion, he made a much-cited speech in which he declared a change of era in German politics. Initially, the SPD followed him cautiously, but it is now pulling back. Especially in the former East Germany, there remains a cultural and political proximity to Moscow among Social Democrats. East Germany has a disproportionate weight in German politics right now because the only state elections scheduled for this year will be in the eastern German states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. While Wagenknecht’s party and the AfD are strong throughout eastern Germany, the SPD is polling at 6 per cent in Saxony – a historical low, and barely above the legal threshold for representation.
In their open letter, the five historians criticised the positions of the party’s leadership on three issues. The first is prevarication over weapons deliveries for Ukraine, including Scholz’s own ambivalent communication on the issue.
The second is the SPD’s failure to accept responsibility for Germany’s failed Russia policies. The way Social Democrats tend to dismiss criticism of their past is by saying that no one could have foreseen that Putin would act this way; the Putin they knew was always friendly towards them. The absurdity of this claim is hard to beat. They chose not to acknowledge Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and a long string of political murders – the most recent example being Alexei Navalny, the dissident who died in a Siberian prison on 16 February.
The party’s mindset was captured well by a comment from Jens Plötner, Scholz’s foreign policy adviser. In June 2022, Plötner said the really interesting question was how the war would affect Germany’s future relationship with Russia. Everything in a modern Social Democrat’s head revolves around the Berlin-Moscow axis.
The historians’ third point is even harder-hitting than the first two. They claim the SPD has locked itself in an intellectual bunker, shunning expert advice and nurturing a culture of disinformation. One example was Scholz’s straw-man argument that the delivery of Taurus missiles would require the stationing of German troops in Ukraine. This is untrue, as has been pointed out by security experts.
When parties reinvent themselves, it usually happens through strong leadership, together with robust grass-roots support. When this job falls to a group of historians, it is not hard to see how it might fail. The SPD has nobody else, young or old, who can lead it out of its deluded nostalgia.
[See also: Germany is on the brink of economic decline]
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This article appears in the 03 Apr 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Fragile Crown