parties
SPD politician Roth: After the federal election I’ll be out
Michael Roth has been a member of the Bundestag for the SPD since 1998. photo
© Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa
Michael Roth is considered self-confident and opinionated. He has been at the forefront of the SPD for a long time. Now he surprisingly announces that politics should end in 2025. The reasons make you sit up and take notice.
Roth justified the decision with a creeping alienation from the party and politics. It was always clear to him that he did not want to retire as a member of parliament. For some time now he has noticed: “I no longer have the bite. I feel an inner distance from the company. Now politics is over. That’s a good feeling.”
The Hessian MP also referred to his growing distance from the SPD. “I’m a passionate social democrat and wanted to become chairman of the SPD one day. But in the last year I noticed that I was becoming more and more unfamiliar with our meetings, that the committees and the atmosphere in them bothered me. When the door to the parliamentary group room opened, I had “The last thing I got the impression was that I was climbing into a refrigerator.”
Roth: Not everyone liked the commitment to Ukraine
The question of war and peace has caused new hardship in the SPD. “Not everyone liked my early commitment to Ukraine. And when I traveled to the country shortly after the outbreak of war, some in the group didn’t even greet me anymore,” said Roth. But it is also true that he bears some responsibility for the alienation: “I fought a lot publicly for my positions and neglected discussions with colleagues because of it.”
Roth, who took a few months off in 2022 due to mental exhaustion, also spoke about the rigors of politics. “Today’s top politicians need absolute resistance to stress, mental and physical strength that is superhuman. The ability not to let themselves be driven crazy. An exuberant self-confidence,” he said. Anyone who pursues top politics today has to give up almost completely. “It’s brutal. Today, top politicians just have to survive every day.”
Roth has been a member of the Bundestag for the SPD since 1998. From 2013 to 2021 he was Minister of State for Europe in the Foreign Office, and from 2014 to 2021 he was also the Federal Government Commissioner for German-French Cooperation. Since 2021 he has been chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag.