Olaf Scholz is campaigning with a zigzag course

Good morning, dear reader,

some decisions can really destroy you. Or, to put it more precisely: the way there. You can weigh up different arguments for hours and still none seem more promising than the other. In the end, you often come to the conclusion that no solution is the best way to solve a problem. And yet: once the decision has been made, that alone can have a liberating effect. As if a burden were lifted from you.

The summitParty officials are constantly faced with such difficult decisions: Where is the party going? Which values ​​were and are important to us and will remain so in the future? And vice versa: Which views do we have to abandon because they are no longer up-to-date and promising?

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Anyone who listens to the voices of SPD politicians in the past few days and weeks will quickly notice that the party is currently asking itself many of these questions very loudly. This is primarily about foreign and defense policy, with a particular focus on Ukraine. Some, it seems, want to turn back time and make the SPD back to what they once stood for: a “peace party” led by a “peace chancellor” who “freezes” wars and focuses on negotiations instead of weapons puts. Others, on the other hand, talk about making Germany “war-worthy” again or strengthening Ukraine so much that Russia can be forced to the negotiating table in the first place.

Both together cannot work. The SPD and the Chancellor are increasingly taking a zigzag course in their attitude towards Ukraine. It doesn’t work well for long. If there is no word of power, such discussions have the potential to seriously damage parties. The SPD would therefore do well to end this dispute over direction. But who is Chancellor? Olaf Scholz Anyone listening these days must assume that this discussion of direction will not end so quickly. Scholz is the both/and chancellor. In the end, this will benefit neither him nor the party – and certainly not Ukraine.

The lines of conflict in the SPD run something like this: On the one hand, there is the SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich or Ralf Stegner, who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The faction leader caused a stir last week, when he raised the following question in the Bundestag: In Ukraine, we now have to not only talk about “how to wage a war, but also think about how we can freeze a war and end it later?” During the debate, Stegner vehemently defended the Chancellor and the non-delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine and ended his speech with the words: “You don’t like that, we do and you’ll notice, the population does too.”

“Freezing” may sound like relaxation, a standstill and a cooling of the temper. What is forgotten is that Ukraine has already gone through such a process after the annexation of Crimea with the Minsk Agreement – and that in 2022 the Russian troops not only thawed the conflict again, but also finally escalated it. Russian President Vladimir Putin also made it clear several times that he did not want to deviate from his maximum goals – especially not when Ukraine is currently rather weakened militarily.

But there are also other voices in the SPD. Michael Roth, for example, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He replied to Mützenich that the whole of Eastern Europe was paved with frozen conflicts, “like the north of Siberia with permafrost”. Or Boris Pistorius: The Defense Minister continues to call for the Bundeswehr to be strengthened, and replied to Mützenich that “freezing” the conflict would currently only benefit the Russian President.

And the Chancellor? He is apparently trying to strike a balance between the two positions: Ukraine will be supported for as long as necessary, Scholz recently said in the Bundestag. For several months now, he has been loudly drumming up the international stage for other countries to do more for Ukraine. After all, Germany is the country behind the USA, the most I’ve done so far.

It is questionable whether Scholz will be successful with this double strategy. At the moment, the Social Democrats in Brandenburg and Thuringia are far away from an election victory. In Saxony there is even a risk of leaving the state parliament. The Ukrainian military, on the other hand, is complaining increasingly loudly about the shortage of ammunition.

Scholz will probably stick to his strategy anyway. In the next federal election, he could portray himself as the level-headed chancellor who kept Germany out of the war. Nobody can know today whether this will end up being a success for him personally. In any case, it remains inconsistent. Another minister, on the other hand, is much more stringent in his policy: Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck recently warned that Germany was not prepared for a return of the “land war”. That needs to be changed now. It was the same Robert Habeck who had already spoken out in favor of arms deliveries to Ukraine in May 2021. At that time, around nine months before the start of the Russian war of aggression, there was still a lot of criticism.

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