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For Olaf Scholz, it’s an item that further narrows his already moderate power options. In recent federal election campaigns, SPD chancellor candidates have invested a lot of energy and rhetoric in somehow maintaining a perspective of power before Election Day.
In 2013, Peer Steinbrück relied on red-green for a long time, with no majority prospects. In 2017, Martin Schulz campaigned for a traffic light coalition, but the FDP blocked it. Now many in the SPD dream of a red-red-green alliance. That could also be utopian.
Scholz does not see the left as capable of governing until now and trusts the reformist camp around the leader of the parliamentary group Dietmar Bartsch and the group’s new foreign policy spokesman, Gregor Gysi. But on anti-war day, September 1, a well-known group of more than 75 leftist politicians published a document with explosive power, the title: “End Foreign Missions, Ban Arms Exports!”
The signatories include the heads of state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, as well as prominent parliamentarians such as Sevim Dagdelen, Ulla Jelpke, Heike Hänsel and Andrej Hunko. It’s an all-out barrage against the likes of Bartsch and Gysi and shows deep divisions in the party that emerged from the merger of the West German WASG and the East German PDS in 2007, because the signatories are mainly located in West Germany.
The German exit from NATO as a condition
It is part of the party’s founding consensus “to bring back the Bundeswehr from all overseas missions and to generally ban the export of arms,” the newspaper emphasizes. “Due to the experience with the SPD and the Greens, who as ruling parties led NATO’s war of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is contrary to international law, participation in a government that conducts combat operations of the Bundeswehr was excluded from the basic program of Erfurt “.
And when it was founded, it was not just a question of calling for the dissolution of NATO and its replacement by a collective security system that included Russia, “but it was also agreed to promote this dissolution of NATO through concrete steps.”
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This includes the demand “that Germany withdraw from NATO military structures.” In the course of the debate on the participation of the government “some in the Die Linke party questioned this founding consensus and indicated an unconditional willingness to form a coalition in the leadership of the SPD and the Greens.” The waiting lines formulated so far for government participation would be relativized and ignored. That is fatal for the future of the party.
Gysi annoys some
In an interview with Tagesspiegel over the weekend, Gysi emphasized that leaving NATO was not an option and would not be sought if there was government involvement. “We are not asking for a way out,” emphasized Gysi, who should make sure that the majority of the parliamentary group reaches a compromise line. “The most important function of the alliance is that the other members of NATO defend a country if it is attacked. We adhere to this principle,” she emphasized. That upset many at the party.
Like the Greens when they joined the government in 1998, foreign and security policy issues threaten to divide the party. The deciding factor will be who is elected successor to outgoing presidents Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger at the party congress in Erfurt in late October, and whether the reformist camp, which demands more pragmatism, can prevail.
SPD bosses flirt with red-red-green
It’s all unfortunate for the SPD, especially Presidents Sasia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, as well as Vice President Kevin Kühnert, who are openly playing with red-red-green, while the centrally oriented Scholz is more of a friend. of an alliance of traffic lights. .
It is true that the Liberals, with their newly appointed Secretary General Volker Wissing, are showing a new openness to this, but running an electoral campaign between these two poles will be difficult. And it is also clear: with such a strong internal opposition in the Left Party, it would take a majority of 20.30 seats for the Red-Red-Green in the Bundestag in order not to remain on the edge in each vote, that is not to the view.
The Willy-Brandt-Haus is consequently reserved when it comes to paper. A spokeswoman emphasizes: “The left has to clarify its internal position. A prerequisite for cooperation with the SPD is a sensible European, security and economic policy.”
The parliamentary group’s foreign policy spokesman, Nils Schmid, is clearer. “The signs from Dietmar Bartsch and Gregor Gysi in recent weeks are definitely going in the right direction.” The question of leaving NATO or a generalized no to all Bundeswehr missions abroad, on the other hand, “is definitely not up for debate” for the SPD.
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Conservative Seeheimer Kreis in the SPD, already skeptical of the project, is moving in an equally clear direction. Its spokesman, defense policy Siemtje Möller underlines: “For the SPD it is clear: Germany must not flee from its responsibility in the world, we are firmly anchored in the Western alliance. An immediate exit from NATO is diametrically opposed to our understanding, we wouldn’t do that bargain once. ”
The Left Party must clarify itself if it wants to be able to govern. “And he has to clarify in his party’s congress how he positions himself in foreign and security policy.” Olaf Scholz is considered the best negotiator of the comrades, and they trust him to be able to forge such an alliance despite all the contradictions, but resolving this resistance in a coalition agreement seems almost impossible.
It seems clear: if it is mathematically sufficient (which is more than questionable today), it will be more than complicated: with the SPD, some are reaching the real political terrain of the facts.
