Florian Pronold heard a “mood that I have seldom experienced” during the election campaign. He was active in Bavaria, Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia. When the Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Environment Ministry had promised such dates a few months ago, his SPD bobbed around in the polls, depressed in third place. Pronold agreed at the time, it was probably social democratic conscientiousness. Now he hears from people everywhere that they are voting for the first time in their lives because of Olaf Scholz. The former head of the Bavarian SPD will not have any of the fruits of this election campaign – possibly the government mandate, a stately parliamentary group. He doesn’t want to either. Pronold draws a line under politics. For a few more months, if the coalition negotiations drag on, he should be acting State Secretary, he will no longer stand for the next Bundestag.
In addition to the election campaign, the 48-year-old also has to devote himself to managing his life as a politician – this is how you meet him for a video conversation, Pronold in Berlin briskly in a leather jacket with a bare, empty shelf behind it. He tends to be “collecting mad”, the Bundestag office is about the decision: What can be thrown away, what is relevant for the archive of the Ebert Foundation, what does he want to keep for himself? His constituency office in Lower Bavaria is supposed to be closed at the beginning of October, after which the delegation’s office in the capital is due to be handed over. Then a political career ends, which began when Pronold joined the SPD in 1989, was elected the youngest member of the state executive at the time in 1993, when he had just started an apprenticeship in a bank after graduating from high school, followed by a law degree. A career that brought him to the Bundestag. He stayed there for almost two decades.
Early professional politics – derisively: “delivery room, lecture hall, plenary hall” – and political activity up to old age are just as common as they are controversial. If someone stops in the middle, without an affair and voluntarily, the question arises: Why only? “For many years it was clear to me that I wanted to do something new before I turned 50,” says Pronold. Also because he has seen many who just couldn’t stop. “I’ve done politics all my life, with joy until the end.” It is nice to stop independently. “That there are still some who say: It’s a shame he goes. Instead of finally.”
He is in the process of “exploring the new life,” he said. The center of his life will be both in Brandenburg, where he built a house with his wife, and in Deggendorf, where he has an apartment, family, friends, as a “rooted Lower Bavarian”. A task is conceivable in which his legal profession is coupled with his heart’s theme: urban development and sustainable building. He already had the job in mind: in 2019 he became the founding director of the Bundesstiftung Bauakademie. After a lot of argument, he did not take up the position: Because of the waiting period that he would have to observe after a government office, it would have been so late that the development of the academy would suffer as a result. “That would have been the ideal platform,” he says, in order to “set up the discourse between experts and decision-makers in such a way that it doesn’t always take years to pass legislation”. But: “spilled milk”, even if he was accused of a “supply job”.
Pronold sees the first few years as State Secretary in the Ministry of the Environment, which was responsible for building, as his most exciting time. Here he was able to design most of the things himself, topics that he himself set out in the coalition negotiations. The mandate was always “fulfilling” – “you can always set the course at the right moment in the right direction”, to the benefit of home, from the motorway exit to innovative urban planning. Or to help if there is a problem with the citizen, for example in dealing with offices, “clinging behind it, often only misunderstandings with the administration can be cleared up”. Politics, the ever new challenges, even the 90-hour weeks will be missing for him.
Will he also lack party politics, which at times have been rather unsuccessful? Pronold was always active in his party, one could also call it a functionary. He was Juso chairman, went through the committees until he was elected state chairman in 2009 as the successor to Ludwig Stiegler. A generation change at a low point after the historically poor state election result of 18.6 percent – at the time. “Flori” is now the right one, said the then mayor of Nuremberg, Ulrich Maly, and Pronold has never completely shed his image as a boy. He tried hard to stabilize the party and also to reform it. He has achieved a lot, but the traditionally quarreling comrades did not make it easy for him.
Pronold was re-elected several times, also in 2015 with a miserable result, because the previously unknown pensioner Walter Adam with a long beard and felt hat appeared as the opposing candidate. There was talk of dismantling, the SPD is good at that. In 2017 Pronold finally no longer wanted, Natascha Kohnen took over.
In retrospect, says Pronold, it can be seen how “harmful” some things were: when a party was divided, when comrades “shoot their own people in the newspaper”. In general, social democrats find it “difficult to praise one another”. The SPD now and Scholz showed: “Solidarity in dealing with one another, not loyalty to the Nibelung, is the key to success.”
What is missing for a portrait for the political farewell? The “Lattengustl”? Pronold smiles when it has to. As Juso, that was what he called the crucified Jesus. That enraged the CSU and Catholic Bavaria. A school newspaper satire in the political controversy, says Pronold, “it was never about mocking people in their beliefs”. An early “learning experience” was: “One thing is impossible in politics – satire.”