“Speak plainly in the dressing room, then go out onto the field as one”

The Chancellor’s party, the SPD, is struggling to find the right course after the debacle in the European elections. Thuringia’s state party leader Georg Maier criticized failings in the party leadership and in the Chancellery. The SPD must “urgently clean up its own backyard in order to be more popular with voters again,” Maier told the editorial network Germany. The left wing of the SPD wants to put pressure on the traffic light coalition in the difficult budget negotiations with a member request.

Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil backed Chancellor Olaf Scholz: In his opinion, he should be seen as the “undisputed number one” of the party. “Olaf Scholz really has the trust of the SPD, and I see no alternative at all,” Weil said in the “Report from Berlin.”

In his opinion, “all relevant parts of the SPD” agree “that we will go into the next election campaign with Olaf Scholz – but then hopefully on a much better basis than was the case this time.”

Weil warned that it would make no sense for the party to publicly quarrel now. It would be more like after a lost football match: “You have to speak frankly to each other in the locker room, but then go back out onto the field as one.”

The SPD received only 13.9 percent of the vote in the European elections, its worst result in a nationwide vote. On Sunday, leading SPD politicians met for a special meeting of the party presidium to discuss the consequences. The results were not immediately announced.

The Thuringian SPD leader Maier called for his party to focus more on “the working middle class.” These people have been badly hit and unsettled by the crises and are wondering who represents their interests. This is especially true in East Germany. “It is no longer possible to explain to anyone why the social gap between East and West is still so wide 34 years after reunification,” said Maier. “The SPD has failed to make this social imbalance in Germany an issue.”

He has been appealing for some time “urgently to the party executive and the Chancellery to finally take action,” said Maier. “But so far without success.” He does not understand “why the SPD does not put the question of justice on the political agenda. That is in our DNA.”

A new state parliament will be elected in Thuringia in September. In recent polls, the AfD was well ahead of the CDU, while the SPD was in the single digits.

Weil said that what needs to change is the cooperation within the traffic light coalition. People are overestimating “what a Chancellor can actually do in a situation like this, where coalition partners (…) do not always show the necessary level of constructiveness.” The three coalition parties are now facing a very difficult task. “And if they are wisely advised, they will agree on a common course.”

The SPD Left is now putting pressure on the budget negotiations to prevent cuts in core areas that are particularly important to them. The SPD group Forum Democratic Left (DL21) decided to initiate an internal party member petition for “a federal budget for 2025 (…) that bears a social democratic signature,” according to a statement on Sunday.

“We want to ask whether the SPD should agree to a budget cut,” said DL-21 co-chair Jan Dieren to “Spiegel”. “In times when democracy is under pressure, prices are rising and many can barely afford to live, it is wrong to save,” warned the SPD member of the Bundestag. “On the contrary: the state must invest massively.”