SPD alliance plans anti-Klingbeil motions to prevent Lars Klingbeil's re-election as party chairman

A broad alliance of working groups within the SPD wants to prevent Lars Klingbeil from standing for the party chairmanship again. This is reported by Spiegel, citing two motions for the SPD party convention in January.

The first motion, supported by the Working Group for Labor (AfA), the SPD women, the AG 60+, the Working Group for Migration and Diversity, the Working Group for Education, and the Working Group SPD queer, states that the chairmanship of the SPD at the federal level cannot be exercised simultaneously with a ministerial office within the federal government in the current situation. The motion further states that the SPD must strengthen its political independence, its programmatic credibility, and its ability to act as a party of workers. For this, a clear organizational and personal separation between the leadership of the party and the holding of government offices at the federal level is necessary in the current situation.

The SPD youth organization Jusos goes a step further in a similarly worded motion by calling for a woman to be the sole chair of the SPD. To preserve its political independence, programmatic credibility, and capacity for action, the youth organization demands that the SPD enforce a separation between state offices within the black-red coalition and the party chairmanship, according to the paper. Furthermore, it demands that the participation of women in top positions of the party be ensured. The strongest instrument for this would be a female single leader, which the Jusos would expressly welcome.

Both motions are clearly directed against a renewed candidacy of the current party chairman Lars Klingbeil, who is also Deputy Chancellor and Finance Minister of the black-red federal government. Klingbeil has so far kept silent on whether he will run for the chairmanship again at the party convention. It is considered unlikely that the SPD party convention could decide on a formal separation of the party and government office because then even the state premiers might not be able to hold positions at the heads of the state associations. Therefore, the working groups and the Jusos are now striving for a political resolution that only targets the current situation in the black-red federal government.