Giffey in the Berlin election campaign: Conservative and successful?

Before the Berlin election there is a crunch in the red-red-green government. SPD top candidate Giffey distinguishes herself sharply – and looks at the CDU and FDP.

There is a photo from the Berlin election campaign that perfectly illustrates the state of the red-red-green coalition after five years of joint government. It was taken in August by a very attentive photographer from the dpa news agency. The picture shows the three top candidates from the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party: Franziska Giffey, Bettina Jarasch and Klaus Lederer stand together on the sidelines of a demonstration by employees of the state-owned clinics Vivantes and Charité.

All three have masks on, their eyes fixed on their cell phones, typing in silence. The dpa photographer pressed the shutter button a couple of times in the hope of a little human interaction. But there are none. Sometimes Giffey looks up, sometimes Jarasch has the cell phone to his ear, sometimes Lederer looks over briefly. Nothing more happens.

Red-red-green alienation

The past weeks and months of the Berlin election campaign are a story of red-red-green alienation. Above all, SPD hopeful Franziska Giffey, the former federal family minister and ex-mayor of the Neukölln district, is consistently conservative in the course of her party and thus pushes the door wide open for a coalition with the CDU and FDP. The Christian Democrats gratefully accepted the offer even before the election: what Giffey said in the election campaign was “pure CDU”, praised their parliamentary group leader Burkard Dregger.

More Charlottenburg, less Kreuzberg

It is a signal to the middle-class electorate: With Giffey as head of the Red City Hall, there would no longer be legally daring experiments such as the rent cap, which her party friend and governing mayor Michael Müller had actively promoted. The ecological mobility turnaround, away from one’s own car and towards sharing offers, e-vehicles and bicycles, would be implemented much less radically. Giffey wants the development of the former Tempelhof airport as well as the controversial extension of the A100 in the south-east of Berlin – something left and green vehemently reject. In contrast to the two coalition partners, Giffey rejects the referendum to expropriate large real estate companies.

SPD lets common projects fail

With the exception of the Berlin SPD youth, hardly anyone in the party is currently openly contradicting it. Instead, the Social Democrats in parliament are letting projects that were actually decided upon, still fail – according to insiders at the behest of the top candidate.

The coalition’s major mobility law, which reorganizes traffic in Berlin with a view to the climate goals, remains unfinished in the dispute over car parking spaces and a city toll because the SPD surprisingly refused to approve the vote. The same goes for the amendment to the building law, which would have introduced an obligation to green roofs and facades, among other things. Shortly before the end of the legislative period, the Urban Green Charter, with which green areas in particular should be secured, fails because of the social democratic no.

“Berlin is not a Bullerby”

It is not really loud in the election campaign in the clashes between red-red-green and the previous opposition, but between the coalition members among themselves. With the sentence “Berlin is not Bullerbü”, Giffey waddles off the green dream of a car-free city. Jarasch reciprocates and accuses Giffey of being “a governing mayor who doesn’t want to change anything because she actually thinks that everything is fine the way it is”. Meanwhile, Lederer says that Giffey is “a sandman.” “Throws sand in people’s eyes and says: Sleep well, Mutti will take care of everything.”

If you believe the polls, however, Giffey’s strategy is working. A year ago, the SPD was bobbing about in the Berlin trend rbb and “Berliner Morgenpost” with 15 percent in third place in the polls, on par with the Left Party, far behind the CDU and the Greens.

Then came Giffey: As a motherly caretaker who wants to make Berlin a “matter of the heart” with gentle severity, but in the background, tough, brings her own troops in line and puts herself at a distance from the red-red-green Senate. The plagiarism affair surrounding her doctoral thesis made hardly any impression. In the meantime, the SPD is leading the Berlin trend with 24 percent of the vote, while polls show that the Greens have little hope of being able to provide the First Governing Mayor.

Two grateful coalition partners are waiting

CDU, FDP and AfD only play supporting roles. CDU top candidate Kai Wegner is still known today under 50 percent, although his posters were already on billboards in the spring. One reason for this may be that, as a second-tier member of the Bundestag, he has little presence in the Berlin debates. That Giffey leaves little room for him as a bourgeois-conservative alternative, too. Wegner and his CDU are now threatened with a historically poor election result.

The FDP can hope to improve its 2016 result slightly, but top candidate Sebastian Czaja is missing a hot topic like in 2017, when he vehemently promoted the continued operation of Tegel Airport and thus attracted the attention of the Liberals. Both the CDU and FDP would be much more sociable and, above all, more undemanding coalition partners for Giffey. In terms of content, they are anyway closer to each other and in purely mathematical terms, according to the current surveys, it would also be enough for a red-black-yellow coalition.

Giffey decides

The AfD does not play a role in the coalition options because none of the other parties want to enter into an alliance with it. But it also fails to have a significant impact on the election campaign. Before the hot phase of the election campaign, the party tore itself apart in internal power struggles and a dispute over direction, in which ultimately top candidate Kristin Brinker narrowly prevailed – with the help of former supporters of the radical “wing”.

It is unclear how the Berlin SPD will cope with the likely election victory. Because a coalition with the CDU and FDP could prove to be an acid test for the party base. But Giffey still holds all the trumps in hand.