Gearing up to German elections 2021 - Merkel’s coalition party SPD puts forward green agenda, struggles with credibility for supporting Nord Stream 2 construction
Gearing up to German elections 2021 - Merkel’s coalition party SPD puts forward green agenda, struggles with credibility for supporting Nord Stream 2 construction
Actually, Olaf Scholz was the best choice in my opinion if the goal is a coalition with the Green and Left party. At the moment this coalition has no majority so to make it possible many people now voting CDU have to be convinced to vote SPD. Olaf Scholz being “very much associated with the Merkel government” is therefore perfect for this. A more left-leaning candidate would have only attracted voters from the Green or Left party and thus not helped at all to strengthen this coalition.
This is following conventional German realpolitik logic, but then the result is a right wing dominated SPD and a marginalized left in both the SPD and its potential coalition partners. The SPD leadership always tries to play this game, and most Germans have sadly swallowed this self-serving logic.
But you can just as easily look at the almost equally strong number of non-voters and see a big left voter pool. While there is no way to be certain, it is likely that a large part of these have moderate leftist leanings, as the AFD was actually quite successful to mobilize the more right wing part of the non-voters.
But as long as the SPD insists on running a “CDU-light” campaign (aka the age old “lesser evil” one), these current non-voters are quite correct in their analysis that it doesn’t really matter who wins the election.
I don’t see the SPD being right-wing dominated. The party base just elected a quite left leader duo and they chose Olaf Scholz to make a left coalation possible in the way I described above knowing he doesn’t really have a chance to become chancellor. So he is just there for the posters to get CDU voters vote for SPD to have a chance for a coalition probably lead by the Green party.
The SPD leadership always has been quite right-wing (in relative terms), especially after the WASG split. But yes, right now the more leftish basis has elected some left blinking figure-heads who in my opinion have consistently not lived up to expectations, but that is another discussion.
I just think the overall idea of trying to “steal back” voters from the CDU (who “stole” some center-leftish voters from the SPD in the Merkel years) is misguided. Those are much more likely to vote Green in the first place or stick with the CDU.
I think both Greens and SPD have the potential to convince different kinds of CDU voters without stealing too much from each other and maybe loosing some voters to the Lefts who should try to get as much non-voters as possible. To me this strategy seems the only one that could lead to a government without the CDU.
@poVoq@lemmy.ml I also prefer politics based on principal to realpolitik. Still, I find this argument interesting, ie. the SPD is indeed taking some risk in putting all their money on a coalition with the Left and the Greens, a combination that according to “voting math” is not the most favorable option for them currently. Looks like they are ready to leave the CDU behind and they also don’t seem interested in the “traffic light coalition” option (SPD - Free Democrats - Greens : red - yellow - green).
The party base elected a quite left party leader duo and less then 10% of the party finances are coming from donations so that the external influence is comparatively low. So yes, I belive they honestly want change and they already did not want a coalition with the CDU after the last election. And when they were kind of forced into it they asked the party base and the result was quite tight. It’s never been a partnership based on sympathy.