SPD: No vote from home for Esken

The state executive committee of the SPD Baden-Württemberg nominated its candidates for the federal executive committee on Monday evening. Acting party leader Saskia Esken is not among them. Several people involved confirmed this to the Süddeutsche Zeitung . According to the report, Esken did not participate in the digital executive conference and had not previously requested to be nominated by her state association.

"With our personnel proposals, we as the SPD Baden-Württemberg are making a good offer to be part of the renewal of the SPD," state leader Andreas Stoch told the SZ newspaper . In the meeting, he had previously explained that while there was a debate on Esken's appointment, he emphasized that the state executive committee was not obliged to take a position on the matter. Stoch reportedly added that the committee would not make a decision for or against Saskia Esken today because she simply hadn't yet declared whether she even wanted to run for federal chairman again. This is possible even without formal support from the state association; the party executive committee would then have to nominate her for re-election.

On Monday evening, the committee re-nominated Stoch, who has been a member of the federal executive board since 2019, as well as Katja Mast, the first parliamentary secretary of the SPD parliamentary group, and Isabel Cademartori, a Mannheim MP and transport politician, instead of Esken. The election was unanimous. The SPD's members' vote on the coalition agreement with the CDU/CSU is ongoing until Tuesday evening at 11:59 p.m.

Baden-Württemberg is not exactly a stronghold of social democracy. In the 2021 state elections, the state association achieved a modest eleven percent of the vote; in the most recent federal election , with 14.2 percent of the second vote, it was even below the already historically poor national result of 16.4 percent.

So it's not the case that the Southwest SPD automatically has a claim to a prominent party position like the federal chairmanship. But thanks to the 2019 membership vote, it currently has Saskia Esken as its co-federal chairwoman, a highly influential position, as the coalition negotiations with the CDU/CSU have recently demonstrated. And it would naturally make sense if the state executive committee had proposed and supported her again this Monday evening as a member of the federal executive committee – as it did in 2021 and 2023. However, this vote failed to materialize this time – and there are apparently several reasons for this.

First, there's Saskia Esken herself, who, according to the state executive committee, has apparently not declared her ambitions to her state association. She has also not publicly indicated whether she even intends to remain party chairwoman. Therefore, she is not on the Stuttgart nomination list for the federal executive committee.

On the other hand, there is widespread frustration, even within her home party, with Saskia Esken's public profile. The left-wing representative from Calw has never been the darling of a broad range of officials in the more conservative state party. But the way the Southwest SPD General Secretary Sascha Binder recently described her in an interview with the Badische Zeitung and Südkurier newspapers was remarkable. He agreed with Saskia Esken that four of the SPD's seven cabinet posts should go to women. "But then it all comes down to who are the four best? And I don't see Saskia Esken among them," Binder said in the interview.

And there is, as Binder's words suggested, the fear that Esken's appointment could obscure the view of other talented candidates from the southwest in the upcoming personnel decisions. After all, it's no longer just a question of whether Esken can remain party leader. It's also a question of whether she could move into a ministerial position instead. Leading figures in her regional association would prefer to see Katja Mast in the cabinet.

The problem is that there is "no really nice off-ramp" for Esken, says one of her critics in the state association. There is simply no suitable position that would make it easier for her to give up the party chairmanship and ministerial post. On the other hand, Esken also has advocates on the state executive committee who believe that the chairwoman cannot simply be dropped. "The fortunes of a party certainly do not depend on the performance of, say, the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development," said a participant in Monday's meeting. Ultimately, the personnel decision must be made in Berlin. And if necessary, the state association could also nominate Esken for the federal executive committee, as happened in 2019.