GERMANY’S NEW Social Democrat (SPD) leader, Sigmar Gabriel, has agreed a power-sharing deal between rival camps to get the party back on its feet after the worst general election result in its post-war history.
Returning to the opposition benches after 11 years in office, SPD rank and file gathered in Dresden for a party conference threw their support behind the burly Mr Gabriel, a former environment minister.
After six leadership changes in as many years, the 50-year-old nicknamed “Siggy Pop” will have to walk a political tightrope if he hopes to survive long.
Mr Gabriel belongs to the party’s centrist camp and was once Gerhard Schröder’s political apprentice in the state of Lower Saxony.
But, in acknowledgement of the SPD’s resurgent left wing, Mr Gabriel will work together with the 39-year-old left-winger Andrea Nahles as general secretary.
In a well-received maiden speech, Mr Gabriel suggested he was planning modest party renewal without deeper change.
He promised to end the top-down style favoured by Mr Schröder and reviled by grassroots, and even admitted to key failures of Schröder-era welfare reforms.
But, apart from a vague promise to reintroduce a wealth tax, he has refused to entertain concrete left-wing demands and insists the party will continue its centrist path in opposition.
“The SPD doesn’t just have to be able to govern again, it has to want to govern,” he said. “We haven’t broken with the politics of the last 11 years, but we have to debate now what importance we give to public welfare in the future.”
Mr Gabriel replaces Franz Müntefering, a loyal Schröder deputy, who was blamed for the 11-point collapse in support in the general election to just 23 per cent.
“We’ve lost half our voters since our 1998 victory,” he told members.
The last direct connection to Mr Schröder is his former chief of staff and foreign minister, Frank Walter Steinmeier, now opposition leader in parliament.
Behind the show of harmony in Dresden, the party is facing an identity crisis arising from its intertwined history with the old Communist Party (KPD).
Both parties suffered under the Nazis and then, after the war in what was then Germany’s Soviet sector, the SPD was forced to merge with the KPD into what became East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED).
Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the reformed SED Left Party poaches SPD voters, the party leader faces a decision that has been dubbed “Siggy’s Choice”.
If he keeps the SPD in the political centre and away from the Left Party, he risks driving away even more rank-and-file left-wingers riled by Schröder-era economic and social reforms.
The consequence of that is clear in many eastern federal states where the SPD has already fallen into third place behind the Left Party and even shares power there at local level.
The other alternative – to abandon the centre and embrace federal-level Left Party co-operation – will revive painful memories of the forced union of 1946 as well as of the departure of Oskar Lafontaine a decade ago.
A year after he got Gerhard Schröder elected, Mr Lafontaine walked out on the party; many SPD members still view him as a traitor for his political renaissance as leader of the Left Party.
Ending a political taboo, Mr Gabriel has said there is “no ideological reason” why a coalition is impossible between the two parties.
But any co-operation, he says, will require the Left Party to make policy concessions, such as ending its opposition to German military deployments and Germany’s Nato membership.