After being passed over for a ministerial post in Germany’s new grand-coalition government, it was clear that Saskia Esken’s time as a leading face of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was approaching its end. Indeed, even her own state chapter declined to renominate her for the party executive several weeks before. Still, though hardly a surprise, the news that the erstwhile left-wing outsider would not stand for reelection as party cochair — some two months after the party took yet another electoral trashing, before subordinating itself to a government led by the Christian Democrats (CDU) — feels just a little bit historic.
Though her post will likely be filled by the new labor minister, Bärbel Bas, nominally a member of the party’s left flank, Esken’s exit marks the end of German Social Democracy’s brief (and remarkably superficial) attempt to go “back to the roots,” i.e., tack to the Left in an attempt to recover lost electoral ground.
This leftward pivot in fact began before Esken with the nomination of Martin Schulz as chancellor candidate back in 2017, but was nearly buried following the latter’s humiliating electoral performance, only to be revived two years later by Esken and her co-candidate, Norbert Walter-Borjans, who narrowly defeated establishment favorite (and 2021–25 chancellor) Olaf Scholz. But following Walter-Borjans’s retirement in 2021, the election of Lars Klingbeil as her new cochair, and the very public resignation of fellow token left-winger Kevin Kühnert last fall, control over the party is firmly back in the hands of the apparatus, even insofar as it ever wasn’t.
Voices both in and outside the party have criticized the undeniable gendered dimensions of Esken’s treatment. After all,…
Auteur: Loren Balhorn
