Berlin The great music fan Lars Klingbeil begins his speech at the SPD party conference on Saturday with a quote from the indie rock band Kettcar. “Just because you’ve gotten used to it is not normal.” Klingbeil is alluding to the long CDU government. Now dust off the country, the SPD has “freed the country from the must of the conservatives,” he calls into the hall.
Klingbeil made a decisive contribution to the victory of the SPD in the federal election as General Secretary. He has thus qualified for even higher offices: With 86.3 percent Lower Saxony was elected as the new SPD party leader alongside Saskia Esken. It received a slightly weaker result with 76.7 percent of the vote.
Klingbeil is now the man for the time after Scholz. Scholz has only been Federal Chancellor for a few days. But at 43, Lars Klingbeil is also the youngest party leader the SPD has ever had. If Scholz were to resign as Chancellor after eight years, Klingbeil would still only be 51 years old.
Klingbeil says he has an “interest in being party leader for a little longer and also in shaping the office and the party”. The reorganization of the SPD was not completed despite the election victory. “We have achieved a lot, but we still have a lot to do. We are on the threshold of a social democratic decade, ”said Klingbeil in his application speech as party leader.
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Next year there are four state elections, including in North Rhine-Westphalia, the heart of the SPD, and in Lower Saxony, Klingbeil’s home. Just as the new Chancellor Scholz does not get a grace period because of Corona, the new SPD leadership will hardly get one.
Social change is a key issue
As the new party leader, Klingbeil wants to develop the SPD programmatically after having had to organize a lot as general secretary. “I’m looking forward to getting a little out of the organizational hamster wheel. I’m in politics because I want to shape the country. “
The central topic for the political scientist is the change in society. He wants to combine the major upheavals that are pending – in education, in the welfare state, through digitization – under the heading “Transformation” into an overall concept.
That is why Klingbeil has recently been gathering experts around itself, such as transformation researcher Maja Göpel, scientist Laura-Kristine Krause from “More in Common” or experts from the IG Metall environment.
But the SPD boss already has a bit of jitters in front of the office: “I know in which footsteps I am following. I just have to look at the ancestral gallery, Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder, Franz Müntefering and Kurt Schumacher, these are people that I sometimes know from history lessons, ”said Klingbeil in an interview.
Klingbeil has a close relationship with former Chancellor Schröder. In the early 2000s, Klingbeil worked in his constituency office and became a pupil of the former chancellor. However, Klingbeil does not want to repeat some of Schröder’s mistakes after his election victory in 1998.
Klingbeil’s good network should help
Klingbeil is counting on Scholz, unlike Schröder, to produce fewer photos in expensive suits when he took office, and instead to deliver more good politics. And unlike Rot-Grün 1998, Klingbeil wants to ensure that the party is not neglected after the election victory. All of this is the basis for ensuring that the SPD does not go under in the upcoming state elections after the federal election this time.
The biggest challenge for Klingbeil will probably lie in something else: on the one hand, to exercise constructive criticism of the government in order to keep the profile of the SPD visible and to sharpen it. And on the other hand, defending government compromises within your own ranks. At the traffic lights with the FDP, disappointments can quickly set in, especially in the left wing of the party.
One advantage: Klingbeil is part of the conservative wing of the party, but is well networked throughout the party, especially among the younger ones.
This is due to the fact that Klingbeils are still almost a young age by political standards and that the soldier’s son has not been in top political positions for that long. Just because the personnel fluctuation in the SPD was so high – Klingbeil served eight chairmen in four years as General Secretary alone – it feels as if the tall Lower Saxony has been with us forever.
After the lost election in 2017, Martin Schulz brought Klingbeil in as general secretary to become the young face of the new SPD. Klingbeil had previously attracted attention as a digital politician and because of his surprising election victory in his previously black Heide constituency.
Martin Schulz (r), then SPD chairman, and the previous general secretary Hubertus Heil (l) congratulate Lars Klingbeil on being elected as the new general secretary of the SPD in 2017.
(Photo: dpa)
After the next, much bigger election victory in the federal election in 2021, organized by Klingbeil, it was clear that if the 43-year-old wanted to become the new party leader with Saskia Esken after the retirement of Norbert Walter-Borjan’s, nobody would be able to dispute him .
In the four years before that, however, not everything went smoothly for him as General Secretary. Klingbeil was initially accused of providing too little content-related impulses. He called “debate camps” and let young party groups “pitch” the best ideas for the future of the SPD in hip locations. Klingbeil himself did not contribute enough to the renewal of the SPD’s content, it said.
Klingbeil, however, interpreted his job differently. Above all, he saw the organizational deficits of the SPD – and concentrated on remedying them. Without a better organization, Klingbeil was convinced that the SPD would have no chance in the 2021 election.
There was also repeated criticism that Klingbeil was too nice for the job and did not attack the political opponent enough. Klingbeil, however, thinks that this loudspeaker policy has become obsolete. He is one of the younger politicians who want to shape a new political style. “Politics shouldn’t be a riot. We won the election through team play, ”said Klingbeil in his speech.
The appearance is also part of this new style. In the past few days, Klingbeil called on Twitter to send him quotes from the band “Kettcar” so that he could include them in his application speech as party leader – which he did right at the beginning.
Klingbeil used to play in the rock band “Sleeping Silence”, a guitar hangs in the corner of his office in the SPD party headquarters, not far from it is a Bastian Schweinsteiger jersey. Like music, football is a passion that Klingbeil shares with the new SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert. That connects. Kühnert and Klingbeil refer to themselves as “friends”.
Now both should shape the SPD as a new leadership team in the next few years. Klingbeil is likely to take on a more presidential role as party leader, while Kühnert can sometimes come to a head.
If he becomes general secretary, Kevin Kühnert will have to mediate in the party even more than he did before.
(Photo: dpa)
The job description of the 32-year-old Kühnert, who has often polarized in the party in the past, also includes keeping the SPD together. The role of the former Juso boss in the SPD is thus being reinterpreted: As before, Kühnert has to listen to the grassroots, but he will have to mediate more than recently as a party vice in the party.
With the election of Kühnert and Klingbeil, the “renewal of the SPD”, the generation change, which was so often invoked after the 2017 election defeat, is complete. Even if under completely different circumstances than expected. In addition to the party, Olaf Scholz is now finally enthroned in the Chancellery. Of course, he sat in the front row at the party congress, right at the front.
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