Germany’s Social Democrats elect left-wing leaders

GERMANY’S BATTERED coalition is on shakier ground than ever after members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the junior partner to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), elected two relatively unknown left-wingers as their leaders. On November 30th party officials announced that Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken had beaten the centrist duo of Olaf Scholz and Klara Geywitz by 53% to 45%, capping a campaign that had lasted nearly half a year. This was a David v Goliath contest: as Germany’s vice-chancellor and finance minister, Mr Scholz had been widely expected to lead his pairing to victory. By contrast, neither of the winning candidates has a national profile. Mr Walter-Borjans is a former finance minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, a big state, with a reputation as a crusader against tax-dodgers; Ms Esken is an MP from Stuttgart who specialises in digital policy.

The vote signals the SPD membership’s clear discontent with the party’s role in government. Despite a degree of policy success on matters like pensions and climate change, the SPD is struggling in the polls, well behind the Green Party and jostling for third place with the hard-right Alternative for Germany. It has lost around one-third of its support since the 2017 election, which was itself a low-water mark for the party. Mr Walter-Borjans and especially Ms Esken successfully tapped into this sense of gloom, insisting during the campaign that they would lead the SPD “out of the neoliberal wilderness” and flirting with the idea of quitting government.

Yet the result may not necessarily be terminal for the coalition. At the SPD’s annual congress, which begins on December 6th in Berlin, delegates must decide how to respond (they will also rubber-stamp the result of the leadership election). Rather than simply announcing a walkout from government, the party could issue ultimatums to the CDU on matters like raising the minimum wage, reforming taxes, tightening climate policy and boosting public investment (Mr Walter-Borjans has called for a decade-long climate and infrastructure spending programme worth €500bn, or $550bn). The CDU—which is suffering its own wrangles as senior figures jostle for the right to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has vowed to step down by 2021—is keen to hold the government together. Yet Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s leader, has ruled out renegotiating the coalition agreement, which still has two years to run. A period of intra-coalition torment seems likely.

If the coalition does collapse, Mrs Merkel could opt to run a minority government for the rest of the parliamentary term. This option holds some attraction: the parliament has just approved the budget for 2020, and the absence of a troublesome coalition partner might actually make it easier for the chancellor to manage the CDU’s internal problems. It would also avoid political turmoil before Germany takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU Council next July, the last set-piece of Mrs Merkel’s time as chancellor. But Mrs Merkel is sceptical of minority governments, which are alien to modern Germany’s political tradition. The alternative would be to hold an early election, in which the CDU and especially the SPD could expect to lose plenty of seats. The Greens would probably do very well.

That helps explain the scepticism of the SPD’s establishment towards Mr Walter-Borjans and Ms Esken. Like many leftist parties the SPD has regularly had to balance internal tensions between idealists and realists. Lieutenants of Mr Scholz, whose political future is now in doubt, have long briefed that a vote against him would be a vote for political oblivion. Some may reasonably conclude from Saturday’s results that that is precisely what the party is now seeking.