The Social Democrats on the road to success (who are not Olaf Scholz) – POLITICO

BERLIN – The call of Olaf Scholz, the candidate for Chancellor of the German Social Democrats, was sealed during his pragmatic and yet effective tenure as Mayor of Hamburg.

This Sunday, Scholz will have another pair of strong allies in local politics who will help represent the country.

Because two ex-federal family ministers born on the border with Poland are aiming for decisive victories in the state elections just in time for the nationwide election on September 26th. Like Scholz, you come from the dramatically rising moderate wing of the SPD.

Apart from catastrophic missteps, Manuela Schwesig – on site around 22 points ahead of the right-wing extremist alternative for Germany – will return as Prime Minister in Schwerin’s Disney-like palace parliament, while Franziska Giffey – currently in front of the Greens in the capital – has no chance – as Mayor the Berlin Red Manage town hall.

“Your success would also strengthen and support Olaf Scholz’s line within the SPD,” said Ursula Münch from the German Academy for Political Education.

The minister-presidents and mayors of the 16 German federal states and city-states are influential personalities in domestic politics who, through the upper house of the Bundesrat, are in a position to influence national legislation, while inside they have far-reaching powers in all areas from education to transport to Have health care.

During the pandemic, the regular video conference summits between the regional chiefs and Chancellor Angela Merkel on lockdown measures helped raise their profile. The debates were particularly important as they, and not Merkel, had the final say on curfews and restrictions.

If Scholz becomes chancellor – up to weeks of coalition talks – the partnership with Schwesig and Giffey will also polish up his image in future calls.

Jump back

It was not always certain whether Schwesig or Giffey would stand for election at all.

Schwesig, family minister in the coalition government during Merkel’s third term in office between 2013 and 2017, decided in 2019 to step down from her role as head of government in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania while she was being treated for breast cancer.

Today, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls election tracker, support for Schwesig’s local party is 38 percent, dispelling fears that Germany’s two big ones People’s Party could never again win the kind of opposition support they once enjoyed in important strongholds.

Meanwhile, Giffey spent her later months as Federal Family Minister fighting against allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis, and finally resigned from her post in May of this year. But she survived the aftermath and became the favorite for the next Berlin mayor, a position previously held by party genius Willy Brandt in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Both women benefited from a nationwide turnaround in the SPD this summer.

At the end of last year, the Christian Democrats in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania were tied with the SPD, and in early summer 2021 the Greens were seven points ahead of the SPD in Berlin.

The party’s sudden boom at the national level and in the two local campaigns is due to the fact that voters are looking for “pragmatic†options in times of upheaval, Giffey POLITICO said in an election campaign this month.

“If you look at last year we had 14 percent and now we have 25 percent” [nationally] So something has happened in the meantime, â€said Giffey in front of a Russian supermarket in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn.

“I am firmly convinced that many want a pragmatic political course and not an ideological political course,” she said, referring to the decades-long struggle between the two main factions of the SPD.

This is a diagnosis that many in the ranks of the Social Democrats share with Scholz, and it is a blow to the party leadership, which is firmly leaning to the left.

Scholz lost a party chairmanship in 2019, but agreed on the SPD’s candidacy for chancellor with the winning duo Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken. Because many in the party wanted to campaign for stability in the first federal election so that they would not have a chancellor after Merkel’s departure.

“People don’t want to take any chances,†said Bettina Martin, Minister of Education of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and a close ally of Schwesig from her time as Federal Minister for Family Affairs. “People choose the person and party they trust, that’s the mechanism for now.”

The critical question now is whether major victories in both Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will strengthen Scholz’s authority if he can negotiate a coalition agreement after the election on Sunday.

There also remains the prospect that both regional leaders will rise again to the federal level, reflecting the career of Scholz himself, who served as labor minister in the late 2000s before becoming regional minister.

“Finally Scholz came back himself [to federal politics] after his tenure as mayor of Hamburg, â€says Thorsten Faas, Professor of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin. “Especially politicians who were previously active at the federal level, of course, know very well how much more is possible there.”

Nice Nöstlinger and Merlin Sugue contributed to the reporting.