SPD in Crisis Mode: Emergency Meeting at the Chancellor’s Office Sparks Leadership Showdown

There are rumblings at the traffic lights: The coalition committee is due to discuss the simmering conflict on Wednesday. Previously, Scholz apparently called his party friends to him.

SPD leaders arrived at the Chancellors on Sunday evening for talks. “Bild” and ntv report on this with agreement. Accordingly, party leaders Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken, as well as General Secretary Matthias Miersch, should be with Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Later, the leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, came to the Chancellor for a discussion. According to t-online information, the leadership of the party was said to have already left at this point. The conversation had been planned for a long time.

The most prominent topic in both rounds: the newly ignited traffic light crisis. After all, it recently became known that Scholz wants to talk to Finance Minister Lindner and Green Economy Minister Robert Habeck next week. The meeting will be held in private before going before the coalition committee on Wednesday. So the situation is serious.

A recent paper by Lindner particularly led the discussions. In it he calls for an “economic turnaround”. To this end, he calls for the immediate and final abolition of the solidarity surcharge, for the suspension of new regulations and a change of course in climate policy. The document, which became public on Friday, was not previously agreed with its partners in the coalition and since then it has been criticized by different sides, but also within the FDP.

Esken gave Lindner a clear refusal on Saturday. “On the whole, the points he listed there cannot be implemented in the coalition,” said the chairman of the SPD. Co-head Lars Klingbeil admitted on Sunday on ARD: “We have a problem.” The paper presented by Lindner is partly neoliberal ideology. It is possible to do more against bureaucracy or more for education. But it is not possible to make the rich even richer. Instead, the working middle class needs to be relieved. “That is why we will not follow the liberal path.”

Due to the tensions between the three traffic light partners, there is more and more speculation about the collapse of the coalition. Klingbeil said the bickering in the federal government didn’t help. Provocations must stop. “We have a job to do. It’s about running the country.” The government has been elected for four years and wants to govern. “It’s already been a week of decisions,” Klingbeil said. He referred to the US presidential election and the coalition committee. The latter should indicate whether we want to take the path together. We then move straight on to the next steps, such as passing the budget in the Bundestag.