Doom and gloom have greeted yesterday’s news that two left-wingers have won the dual leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans are barely household names in their own party and were the underdogs in the run-off against the party’s centrist establishment, represented by Olaf Scholz and Klara Geywitz. Yet last night they beat the frontrunners by 53 per cent to 45 per cent in a vote of a party membership increasingly dismayed at the SPD’s fading identity and dismal, mid-teens polling numbers. Members may not have been very familiar with Esken and Walter-Borjans, but with the other “change” candidates knocked out in earlier stages, the duo seemed to many like the only alternative to more of the same.
Much of German press reaction ranges from sad resignation to something verging on hysteria. The conservative but normally measured Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) today thunders that the SPD seems to have lost any sense of “national responsibility”. The liberal-conservative Welt leads with quotes about the SPD’s “self-destruction”. Even the centre-left Süddeutsche Zeitung laments that the party is so at odds with itself and doubts that Esken and Walter-Borjans, in contrast with federal finance minister and former Hamburg mayor Scholz, have the experience and base in the party to get things done.
Content from our partners
