As Secretary General Kevin Kühnert will have to make a public appearance. The former Juso chairman has been known for this since his No-Groko campaign.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin Kevin Kühnert is to become the new general secretary of the SPD. Party circles confirmed this to the Handelsblatt. The leadership of the SPD had agreed on this. Officially, the personnel proposal is to be decided on Friday by the presidium and party executive committee of the SPD. First of all, the “Spiegel” reported about it.
Kühnert will be the successor to Lars Klingbeil, who will run for chairmanship together with Saskia Esken at the SPD party conference on December 11th. Esken’s previous co-boss Norbert Walter-Borjans had declared that he no longer wanted to run for office.
Kühnert had long been traded for the post of Secretary General. The 32-year-old quickly made a name for himself in the party after being elected Juso boss in 2017. Kühnert campaigned vehemently against a new edition of the grand coalition and caused a sensation nationwide with brilliant party conference speeches.
Many see Kühnert as one of the greatest talents that the SPD has produced in a long time. However, critics accuse him of having brought the party to the brink of split with his drumming against the grand coalition. His socialism theses, which Kühnert had formulated in a Zeit interview during the last European election campaign, were resented internally.
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NDR documentary about Kühnert provides a topic of conversation
The documentary on NDR television, which appeared recently, is also controversial within the party. For three years Kühnert let himself be accompanied with his work with the camera. Some comrades give him credit for this.
The documentary shows what a back-breaking job politics is and how much Kühnert seeks contact with the citizens. Others consider the series to be mere self-PR, in which Kühnert comes across as a pure puller who cares little about content.
Kevin Kühnert had supported the duo of Walter-Borjans and Esken in the election campaign.
(Photo: imago images / photothek)
In 2019, Kühnert played a key role in the election of Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans as party chairmen, who were considered outsiders in the membership decision against Olaf Scholz and Klara Geywitz.
Kühnert not only gathered the Jusos behind the candidate duo, he also succeeded in successfully organizing their internal party election campaigns and asserting themselves against Scholz’s finely-oiled machine.
With the election of Esken and Walter-Borjan, Kühnert was promoted to SPD party vice in 2019. He is now giving up this position in order to take the job of Secretary General for the next step in his career. Kühnert’s office as party vice is to take over NRW-SPD leader Thomas Kutschaty, who wants to recapture North Rhine-Westphalia for the SPD in the state elections next year.
In this election campaign, the new Secretary General Kühnert will also be challenged. NRW is still the most important federal state for the SPD, where the party has by far the most members. In addition to NRW, there are also state elections in Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony in 2022.
Kühnert and Klingbeil made a name for themselves as a duo. Since Klingbeil is now the SPD chairman, Kühnert takes over his position as general secretary.
(Photo: imago / Mauersberger)
The SPD had repeatedly puzzled whether Kühnert would actually do anything and trust himself to be the general secretary. From the point of view of almost all comrades, he is rhetorically a born Secretary General.
Some do not trust him to do the job
However, some doubted whether Kühnert is really ready to take on responsibility. “In the future, it will be him who, in the worst case, will have to declare election defeats on Sundays. And he will be the one with whom the electoral defeats go home, ”says a top comrade. For a long time, some in the party assumed that a woman would be more likely to become General Secretary.
Even if the party leadership is completely reorganized, it is already quite good. Esken and Kühnert jointly contested the party-internal election campaign in 2019. The future co-chairman Klingbeil belongs to the business-friendly wing of the party. However, Klingbeil and Kühnert connect, or at least that’s how they put it, a kind of friendship. They share a lot of the same interests like football or music and did a podcast together during the election campaign.
More: Kevin Kühnert: “The SPD doesn’t need an economic program for the ‘Today Show'”