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Armin Laschet got away with impunity, while the Social Democrats lost almost half a million votes. The reaction of the party leadership to this is exemplary for the social democratic malaise: loss of reality from every point of view.
The SPD leaders’ assessment of the election outcome around Norbert Walter-Borjan and Saskia Esken seems partly strange.
Political exegesis of election results is an art. Especially when politicians are not on the ballot but are significantly affected by the outcome of the election. The Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet, recently mastered this discipline with great success. Although the CDU lost around 180,000 votes compared to 2014 and achieved the worst post-war result, the local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia are interpreted as a tailwind for the party. The reasons for this: The dreaded “Corona gossip” for the father of the state did not materialize, and the CDU’s approval was slightly above the outcome of the 2017 state elections.
Laschet’s victory is not to have lost. This is a position that the SPD can only look at with envy. The Social Democrats experienced something over the weekend that can only be described as a strong downdraft in terms of political thermals. Of course, general conclusions from local election results can be drawn with caution. But North Rhine-Westphalia can be considered the latest evidence of the thesis that has persisted since the election of the current duo of presidents Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans: the SPD has lost touch with reality.
Political ventricular fibrillation
Because where can more political reality be found than in rural districts, cities and municipalities? The party lost nearly half a million votes over the weekend in a state that breathless election journalists describe as its bulwark or even its chamber of the heart. In Bochum the SPD lost five, in Dortmund eight and in Gelsenkirchen even more than fifteen percentage points. In the last two cities, the candidates for mayor of the Social Democrats will have to go to a second round in two weeks.
From first-time voters to those over 70, the SPD has lost sympathy across all age groups. The party cannot boast of any of the five most important electoral motives: when it comes to climate issues, for example, voters think first of the Greens, when it comes to economics they think of the CDU or the FDP, and when it comes to it deals with migration issues, they think about the AfD; Social Democrats, on the other hand, are always classified in places.
The response of the party leadership to the disastrous result says it all. If you could read something like Eskens’s insight “we have not adequately explained the party’s work,” Walter-Borjan’s assessment seems almost strange: Compared to the European elections, things are looking up again, said the former Rhineland finance minister. North-Westphalia. He even talked about a change in trend.
Downward trend reversal
Downward trend reversal: The comrades’ political glow can hardly be better described than with this eccentric assessment of the situation. The reaction entitles all those, inside and outside the SPD, who have long criticized that only distant party officials have the floor. Alone, with ideologies widespread in Berlin, no one can win back a long-lost electorate on the Rhine and Ruhr. The SPD just idly watches as the Greens, who are relatively pragmatic in the west of the republic, slowly turn into the new progressive people’s party. They remove from social democracy those environments and political biotopes in which they were once strong: cities and universities.
For the Bundestag elections and SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz, these do not bode well.
