“Make room for renewal”: Esken will no longer run as SPD party leader

SPD co-leader Saskia Esken will not run for re-election. "I am now giving up my position as party leader and making room for renewal," Esken said on Sunday evening on the ARD program "Report from Berlin." The SPD will elect a new leadership at its federal party conference at the end of June.

"I have had the great pleasure of leading the SPD as party chairwoman for the past six years," Esken continued in the interview. Esken has led the party since 2019. At that time, she and Norbert Walter-Borjans prevailed in a membership poll against future Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his duo partner Klara Geywitz.

Esken: “We have many new faces in the party”

However, Esken has repeatedly faced criticism from within her own ranks, and this has intensified significantly in recent weeks. She herself has now stated that she attributes this to "the fact that, as a left-wing and relatively fearless woman, I speak out when there is injustice in the country."

Esken justified her decision not to run again by saying she wanted to make room for younger candidates. "We have many new faces in the party with whom we can represent our society as a whole, in its entirety," said the SPD leader. "I want to make room for them to take on responsibility now."

SPD federal party leader and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil faced harsh criticism from the grassroots following the launch of the CDU-SPD federal government. At the North Rhine-Westphalia SPD state party conference in Duisburg, young delegates in particular accused him of lacking a clear agenda and accumulating multiple offices while simultaneously "punishing" his co-chair, Saskia Esken. Young party members in the Schleswig-Holstein SPD also voiced their anger.

Several delegates sharply addressed how it could be that Klingbeil, who is now also Federal Finance Minister, had accumulated more and more offices in such a short time after the election debacle, while Esken had to bear the consequences of the slap in the face alone. "It's indecent what happened there, that the women are cashing in again and the men are getting the top job," one delegate complained.