Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania state election | The pseudo giantess

Manuela Schwesig is more popular than almost any other SPD politician in the Federal Republic. Photo: dpa/Philip Dulian Before the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, the SPD's top candidate Armin Willingmann suggested reducing the previous threshold from five to three percent. The poll numbers for his party were poor. He received scorn and ridicule.

Meanwhile, the schadenfreude has changed sides. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the polls for the CDU are at seven percent. The co-chair of the Green Party at federal level, Felix Banaszak, accuses the Social Democratic Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig of threatening to push his party and the CDU below the five percent water line.

On September 6th, the SPD in Saxony-Anhalt performed better than expected and than five years previously. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the latest survey shows that it is catching up with the AfD, which is now only just in the lead. In Berlin, however: the latest terrible prospect is a meager twelve percent.

Georg Fülberth, born in 1939, was professor of political science at the University of Marburg from 1972 to 2004.

So much for the situation in three federal states. High up, at the federal level, the howling misery reigns equally among the CDU/CSU and the SPD. The poll numbers are in the basement for both.

The CDU/CSU has locked itself between two firewalls. On the one hand, it officially distances itself from the AfD, but on the other hand, Friedrich Merz was already dependent on the tacit good behavior of the party “Die Linke” in May 2025 in the second attempt at his election as chancellor. However, a second firewall is still maintained opposite it. If it fell, the dam would also break on the right, and the desertion to the AfD could no longer be stopped. Merz is effectively banned from appearing in the East. It's only holding up for now because no replacement has yet been found for it.

The SPD has no such needs. She doesn't have to build a firewall against the AfD. There is no danger that a right wing would move there. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the SPD under Schwesig has been ruling quietly with the Left Party since 2021. The two federal chairmen Bärbel Bas and Lars Klingbeil cut a similarly bad figure as Chancellor Merz. But unlike the CDU, the SPD currently has a ray of hope: Manuela Schwesig. The prone position of her party now makes her a pseudo-giant: the worse off the SPD is, the bigger she stands.

The prone position of her party now makes Schwesig a pseudo-giant.

She ignores expectations that she could become federal chairwoman after Bas and Klingbeil are overthrown. A positive reaction would damage her current election campaign. She is warned by the sad fate of Bärbel Bas. For several years she was a pleasant surprise: a steadfast representative of the left wing of the SPD. When she agreed to take responsibility for Merz's policy of social cuts as co-chair of her party and minister, this glory was over. If this were to happen again, Schwesig would also shrink below normal size.

It could only contribute to a renewal and a resurgence of the SPD if it led it from its current subaltern position into the opposition at the federal level. Olaf Scholz thinks he knows why that doesn't work. In a rare statement, the former chancellor warned of a break in the coalition.

The SPD had already allowed itself to be pushed out of a grand coalition once: in 1930. This marked the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic. The Social Democrats couldn't do anything about her expulsion at the time. Big business wanted it that way, and it was once again stronger. The catastrophe accelerated when the SPD tolerated the ruinous policies of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and thereby weakened itself. She sacrificed herself to keep the NSDAP out of power. With his warning, Scholz shows that wrong things can be learned from history.

At that time, a double firewall separated the KPD and SPD from each other. Each of the two parties refused to cooperate. Today, it is not such a demarcation that stands in the way of a common opposition between the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens, but rather the current state of the three parties: the SPD is alienated from its old base, the Greens are a middle-class party with neoliberal leanings, and the Left has not yet been able to fill the gap left by the Social Democrats in their presence in the workforce, unlike the AfD in some cases.

The credibility that has been lost since Gerhard Schröder cannot be undone through skilful campaign management, nor because Schwesig, like three CDU prime ministers, sensibly opposes the abolition of the tax-free pension at 63 and after 45 years of contributions. Only after the break of the current black-red coalition, whatever caused it, would a new beginning have a chance.

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