Raed Saleh smiles a lot in public. If the 45-year-old doesn’t do that, it speaks for the seriousness of the situation. When the SPD faction leader walked past the casino on the first floor of the Berlin House of Representatives on Thursday afternoon, his face made an impact tense to the max. At this point in time, Kai Wegner had already failed twice in Parliament as Governing Mayor. The third ballot will decide everything.
Saleh and Wegner have spent hours since noon looking for dissenters in their factions. Who is secretly questioning the entire coalition here? Who attacks your work? Almost everything is at stake for the Berlin SPD this afternoon. If the third ballot had also failed, the CDU would probably have ended the alliance. At least that’s what the CDU is saying. The SPD and its leadership around Franziska Giffey and Saleh would have been done as reliable allies.
The day after, however, the line is clear: the election is done, now it’s time to govern – the argumentation of the AfD is presented as a lie. Party leader Saleh issues the slogan: Only the CDU and SPD votes would have led to the election. That can be proven just as little as the opposite. But the Berlin state association is now even more nervous than it already is. The Dissenting votes from the SPD are also valued as reminders for Saleh. The faction leader no longer seems unassailable.
On Thursday, former Secretary of State for Education Mark Rackles wrote a letter to the two state chairmen, Giffey and Saleh. The paper is in front of the Tagesspiegel. In it, the former head of the SPD-Left calls for a reorganization of the party and for the Senate members to resign from the executive state executive. Rackles writes of “an extreme Overload of elected representatives and officials“, since almost all members have little capacity for their role.
“Sometimes you have to take a step back”
As Rackles writes, there is no time for “urban political debates that go beyond pure administrative logic”. He also thinks it is necessary for fundamental reasons to separate party and government work for the most part – as is usual with the Greens and the Left. The federal SPD has a similar model. Therefore, according to Rackles, the members of the Senate should now make room for new personnel. He asks the state chairmen: “Sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward.”
On May 26, the party meets for state party convention, also to evaluate the election. “There will be a bang there,” say experienced social democrats. Many assume that a narrow majority of the delegates are against the grand coalition anyway. So far, it is said behind closed doors, no strategy of the party leadership is discernible.
Silent government is not enough
The deputy state chairman and head of the powerful district association of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Kian Niroomandtold the Tagesspiegel: “We now need a timetable and an overall strategy by the end of the year, if possible, on how we can be more successful again in 2026 than 18.4 percent.” Niroomand is important: “We now have to talk constructively about content and structures and look to the future .”
Simply governing silently alongside the CDU will not be enough, said Niroomand. “The party now has the central task of accompanying government work constructively, but also critically.” To do this, the state association must become more of a “idea generator for political impulses”. “We are not running in the elections as a senate or parliamentary group, but as a party. To do this, it must be clear what the SPD stands for.” This was shown in the election: the Senate’s good government work during the energy crisis did not pay off for the SPD.
On Friday after Wegner’s election, for the first time in a long time it was heard in the SPD that resistance against the state chairmen could be organized. In particular, the left-leaning district associations of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Mitte and Neukölln are mentioned. A glimpse into the soul of the party gave a Tweet by the former party executive Julian Zado: “You shouldn’t accept such an election, you shouldn’t enter such a Senate,” Zado wrote. Not a few think like him. In any case, only 54.3 percent of the members supported this alliance.
Despite all the criticism, neither Raed Saleh nor Franziska Giffey can expect to be voted out on May 25th. Party elections are not planned until next year. A two-thirds majority of the delegates would be needed to turn the party conference in May into an election party conference. Also the new Labor Senator and potential Giffey competitor Cansel Kiziltepe said on Friday in an interview with the Tagesspiegel: “The party chairmanship is currently not an issue for me.”
