Status: 04.11.2021 3:49 p.m.
SPD leader Esken wants to run again for the party chairmanship. However, it needs a new partner with a dual leadership. Secretary General Klingbeil is the favorite. The SPD wants to make a proposal on Monday.
She thought about it for a week, now the decision has been made: Saskia Esken wants to run again for the party chairmanship of the SPD. She has decided to “renew her application for the highest office in the party,” confirmed the 60-year-old to the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten”. Your goal is to continue the path you have chosen with the previous co-party leader Norbert Walter-Borjans – even if he does not start again.
“I see my task in modernizing the SPD, strengthening its historically grown values and developing social democratic ideas and positions from this with its members and in exchange with society,” she said.
At the top of the party since 2019
Esken has been leading the SPD together with Norbert Walter-Borjans since 2019. After their election, the public struggles for supremacy among the Social Democrats had ceased. This calm in the party is seen by many as the cornerstone of the SPD’s success in the Bundestag election.
However, Walter-Borjans recently announced that he would not run again at the party conference in December. Esken had come under pressure. Before the general election, the 60-year-old had signaled interest in another term in office. But she had also been traded as a candidate for a ministerial office in a possible traffic light coalition. That is now considered unlikely. In the SPD, it is taken for granted that the top office in the party and a ministerial post should not continue to coincide, even if this would be possible under the statutes.
Leadership duo Esken / Klingbeil?
The most likely occupation for the other place in the new dual leadership is SPD General Secretary Lars Klingbeil. He had shown himself to be open to becoming head of the SPD. “The chairmanship is a very important, traditional and attractive office in which you can achieve a lot,” said Klingbeil in a recent interview with the RND. It cannot be ruled out that applicants who have not yet been traded may also register. The chairpersons are to be elected at an SPD party congress from December 10th to 12th. First, however, the SPD executive committee wants to make a proposal for the party’s new leadership duo on Monday.