News: Angie Merkel is as good as done

It's interesting how desperate the UK media is to present this as a disaster nonetheless

However it's clear that SPD has navigated some treacherous waters and now has a decent chance to rebuild with the focus now off Federal elections for a couple of years

Lots will depend on how the new face of leadership stacks up, and how well the party can use its recent soul searching to energise at state level.

I think the big losers are FDP who really showed they are not ready to govern.

 

Welfare State Lite™ as we prefer to refer to it.

 

I think that's the key point really. The politicians have a responsibility to govern

We've seen what happens in the US once that skill gets lost and freedom caucus is focussed all the time on political sabotage rather than getting anything done.

 

Personally I think there is a lot of potential upside for SPD if they manage it well.

At a superficial level, Martin Scholz's plan to go into opposition and fix the party seems clever - blaming all the problems on GroKo and Merkel's centrist capture. But the real risk of that strategy was drifting even further into irrelevance. And we sure have seen in other western countries that it can be a decade in the wilderness for the left.

SPD's real problem was a lack of a leadership that can make any of their messages stick. So now they will have a new leader, but they also have Olaf Scholz in the finance ministry with a chance to deliver actual SPD policy (though admittedly he is fiscally conservative for SPD).

In the meantime they can get back to focussing on state politics which are obviously critical, at a time when the national membership is very engaged.

So its not all bad news if the leadership can deliver and especially build personal brands at national level - I think Olaf Scholz is absolutely key to this.

Of course there are big risks, but I never bought into the idea that opposition was going to fix what troubles SPD