The country’s non-starting “autumn of reforms” has already turned into the “spring of reforms,” with concrete proposals on several fronts yet to be reported. The initials results, on long-term care, are expected soon, followed by those on health care funding. After that, plans to reform the pension system are expected by June, so legislation can be drafted and submitted to parliament before it breaks for summer recess in July.
Normally, all this would be a tall order for the SPD. But “major reforms must take place,” Klingbeil admitted in a recent keynote speech, and they must lead to “lower taxes, lower levies, less bureaucracy, competitive energy prices. In short: A country where work is worthwhile again.”
This means the battle within the coalition will be focused on points of detail and priority that Merz and Klingbeil will argue over — both in private and performatively in public — to present their credentials to voters.
But a much bigger question still looms over the SPD, just as it does with similar social democratic groupings in other European countries, such as the U.K. Labour Party and France’s Socialists: Deciding — and declaring — what they actually stand for in the current political context.
These parties have all allowed themselves to be portrayed as overly cautious, looking over their shoulders to identify and forestall the first signs of trouble. Even when they enact radical reforms, they appear frightened by what they have unleashed and end up being punished for it. Then, they retreat into protection rather than innovation, and the vicious cycle continues.
For the SPD, nobody represented this tendency more clearly than former Chancellor Olaf Scholz — a man who never knowingly said or did anything that hadn’t first been risk-assessed to death. Even his one moment of note — his February 2022 Zeitenwende speech, signaling a historic turning point in terms of Russia, hard power and defense spending — quickly fizzled out.
Overall, as across most of the bloc, politics in Germany has grown increasingly bifurcated, with many voters looking for a clearer sense of definition from their politicians. And in this landscape, the SPD’s quiet incrementalism is in danger of being drowned out from both the left and right.
With some of their voters dying out and others simply losing patience, this party in omni-crisis has to decide, once and for all, what it stands for and who it represents. There are no easy choices here. But one thing is clear: Doing nothing and trying to muddle through will consign the SPD to oblivion.