Most recently, the SPD suffered crushing election defeats in Hesse and Bavaria. According to media reports, the chairmen Esken and Klingbeil have now announced that they will run again at the next party conference. You can count on great support.
Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken want to remain together as chairmen of the SPD for another two years. The two announced in the executive committee that they would run again as dual leaders at the party conference in December, as the dpa news agency learned from party circles.
The 62-year-old Esken has been party leader since 2019. At that time, together with Norbert Walter-Borjans, she prevailed in a runoff election of SPD members against today’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his current Construction Minister Klara Geywitz. After the 2021 federal election, in which the SPD became the strongest party for the first time in almost 20 years, Klingbeil, now 45, moved into dual leadership for Walter-Borjans. Before that he was general secretary.
A new party board is elected
As chairmen, the two can count on great support in the SPD. However, the crushing election defeats in Hesse and Bavaria have caused unrest in the party and led to calls for the SPD to raise its profile. Next year there will be the European elections, three state elections in East Germany and several local elections.
The party conference will take place from December 8th to 10th. The entire party executive board with its 35 members will be re-elected. Three key proposals are also to be passed on the modernization of Germany, the realignment of foreign policy and education policy. The presidium and board want to discuss the party leadership’s drafts today.
SPD wants to make billionaires pay
Among other things, the proposals stipulate that income tax should be reduced for 95 percent of the population. For this, multimillionaires and billionaires should be asked to pay more. The SPD also wants to loosen the debt brake, which is not going down well with its coalition partner FDP. The Social Democrats are also campaigning for a further increase in the minimum wage and investments of 100 billion euros annually in education, infrastructure, digitalization and the restructuring of industry.