To be honest, you are pretty flabbergasted when you look at the list of SPD chairmen. Sure, August Bebel, Friedrich Ebert, Willy Brandt, Hans-Jochen Vogel, all big names. But then after 1990? To date, a total of 19 people, sometimes acting, have been at the top. The 20th chairman will soon be appointed and he will be the youngest ever leader of Europe’s oldest party.
Secretary General Lars Klingbeil, 43, benefits from his late election campaign success. When the SPD lagged at 15 percent, some would have preferred to chase him into the Gobi desert. But the winning political professional got through the little crisis as well as the change from conscientious objector to military politician or from member of the parliamentary left to the right “Seeheimer Kreis”.
Now Klingbeil is acting as the “countervailing power” to the left co-boss Saskia Esken, all in the service of election winner Olaf Scholz. There are “great upheavals” ahead of us, says Klingbeil, who was nominated for the SPD dual leadership, and his party must be the “people’s point of contact”. In the Corona case, this means free tests and 3G for work via the SPD-Greens-FDP coalition. For the new office, Klingbeil can read a little more about Bebel: “If the opponent praises you, then that is questionable; he scolds, then you are usually on the right track. ”
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With its concrete building in Frankfurt-Bockenheim, the Bundesbank was already a visual guarantee of stability for 50 years. The architectural brutalism corresponded to monetary policy rigor. But now my colleague Jan Mallien hears that the renovation of the headquarters including the campus will cost well over 1.3 billion euros – more than the new building for the European Central Bank (ECB) seven years ago.
The Bundesbank explains that the requirements for public construction projects have “changed substantially”, and that construction costs and raw material prices have risen. In addition, it is about 5000 jobs and not about 2900 as at the ECB. One can only hope that Guido Müller, Head of the Central Construction Department, performs better on this project than with the old employer BND. There, the ex-vice boss was responsible for the somewhat bumpy move of the secret service from Pullach to Berlin.
The economy did not expect delivery bottlenecks and rising energy prices of this magnitude. And so in the annual report that they will hand over to the federal government tomorrow, Wednesday, there is a damned meager number. The German economy will only grow by 2.7 percent in 2021; in March the Council of Economic Experts had forecast 3.1 percent.
It is as always in these volatile times: growth will come, only later and stronger, supposedly in 2022 at a rate of 4.6 percent. When it comes to the question of whether state investments outside the budget can be financed, for example via funds, the committee is making a stalemate: Volker Wieland and Veronika Grimm on the other hand, Monika Schnitzer and Achim Truger in favor.
There was never anything like that with the wise men, but it has never happened before that the government parties could not agree on a fifth member. Then it would have been 3-2, whatever.
Anyone who wants to pursue geopolitics by other means can use social media to disinform, finance semi-dubious parties or run their own internet propaganda station. What is particularly perfidious, however, is what the Russian de facto satellite Belarus is practicing on the EU’s eastern border – organized mass refugee movement.
Ruler Alexander Lukashenko is practically a smuggler. Many migrants have come to Belarus from Damascus and Istanbul via Moscow. Hundreds of people are currently waiting on the border with Poland. Some now tried to cut the barbed wire on the Polish-Belarusian border. Poland gathered troops and sent back people who managed to convert.
In this region humanity has lost a lot at the moment. Incidentally, Evan Neumann, one of the Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, has just applied for asylum in Belarus.
Siemens CEO Roland Busch recently became head of the Asia-Pacific Committee of German Business, a jewelry position that he took over from his predecessor Joe Kaeser. In an interview with Handelsblatt, Busch would like to see the “rapid ratification” of the investment agreement between the European Union and China. In detail, the 56-year-old manager says about …
- his program: “We are currently experiencing less instead of more cooperation in many areas. It is all the more important to seek and strengthen the dialogue now. As Europeans, we have to throw all our weight into the balance in order to prevent new blocks and new dividing lines in the Asia-Pacific region. “
- the superpowers: “We should set our own agenda so that we don’t become the plaything between China and the USA, which are currently claiming leadership – politically, economically and technologically. We are very dependent on each other. “
- New political priorities: “With hydrogen, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 or quantum computers, we must not become technologically dependent. The reconstruction programs and the European Green Deal provide a strong impetus for future innovations. We now have to start a strategic coordination between industry, climate, competition and research policy. “
A thought that is attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates fits this strategy: “Whoever believes to be something has ceased to become something.”
In the first half of 2021, car companies such as BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen were more profitable than before the pandemic – despite the lack of chips. But now the question of the sustainability of the vehicles is becoming more and more important. Corporations from the USA and China could depend on German manufacturers for e-mobility. What does this mean for the future of our automotive industry? What do German car companies have to do to assert themselves? Write us your opinion in five sentences [email protected]. We will publish selected contributions on Thursday in print and online, with attribution.
(Photo: imago images / Xinhua)
And then there is Tesla boss Elon Musk and his show number from the share sale decided by a Twitter majority. He now has to buy ten percent of his shares, allegedly a deliberate act, in order to finally pay taxes. The stock exchange acknowledged the self-mortification on Monday with a temporary minus of more than six percent. Musk will be able to get over it, he can cheerfully pull out his stock options, which he planned to do anyway: They turn a total of 320 billion dollars in paper value and the honorary title of “richest man in the world” into real dollars that you can touch. The electric car maker’s block of shares for sale is worth $ 20 billion – so five billion taxes appear manageable. Conclusion: Elon Musk has secured both money and reputation. “God is clever,” said Albert Einstein, “but he is not malicious”.
I wish you a profitable day.
Greetings you warmly
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Hans-Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor
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