By Konstantin von Hammerstein, Horand Knaup, Gordon Repinski, Michael Sauga and Merlind Theile
Peer Steinbrück, the SPD candidate running against Chancellor Angela Merkel in a September general election, is still seen as a risk to the party’s prospects despite a recent boost from Lower Saxony. Damaged by a string of gaffes, he will be kept on a tighter rein and only have a limited say in campaign strategy.
The highlight of the tour is a 1.5-ton bull called Hoeness. Peer Steinbrück, doing the rounds at the International Green Week farming trade fair in Berlin last Friday, stood at the gate and admired the Bavarian beast, renowned for his prodigious breeding capabilities.
Hoeness’ most remarkable feature is his lack of horns, said a farm worker, adding that his offspring even inherited that. “Ah, I’ve only just noticed that,” said Steinbrück. Then he quipped, “you couldn’t do that with me!”
Steinbrück, picked by the opposition center-left Social Democrats to challenge Chancela Angela Merkel in the general election in September, strolled from stand to stand and constantly had to sample foods such as venison salami, marinated herring, strawberry ice cream and meat in aspic, in between shaking hands and posing for photos with prospective voters.
This was an exercise in getting close to the public — something Steinbrück doesn’t always get right. After an hour, his entourage passed a group of schoolchildren, who laughed and waved. It would have been a nice picture, the candidate and the children, but instead of walking over to the group of youngsters, he hesitated.
“You don’t even know who we are,” the candidate growled. He gave a thin smile, passed up the photo op and walked on. Later, when Steinbrück went on stage to make a statement in the exhibition hall of the northern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the crowd booed.
It was his first public appearance since the state election in Lower Saxony on Feb. 20.
The election went well for the SPD — together with the Greens, it won enough votes to oust Merkel’s conservatives from the state government, giving the center-left a much-needed boost ahead of the general election. But Steinbrück, supposedly the face of the party in this election year, was kept in the background all last week while the party’s other leaders took center stage to wax lyrical about the outcome.
A series of verbal gaffes in recent months — saying German chancellors were underpaid, for example — has undermined his position. Usually, the candidate for chancellor is a party’s most important figure in an election year, embodying the hopes and expectations of its members. Ideally this individual should stand for what distinguishes the party from its rivals.
No other representative in the political system is so closely scrutinized by the electorate. Do voters really want to entrust this man or woman with their country’s future — and their children’s future?
Steinbrück would like to assume this role — but he can’t, at least not now. In this important week for the SPD, he got to inspect Hoeness the bull and grin at the cameras. That’s not much for a chancellor candidate and it shows how precarious his political position remains. Indeed, the SPD’s narrow state election victory has only brought one certainty: Speculation that Steinbrück might throw in the towel has been disproved.
No one feared such a scenario more than SPD Chairman Sigmar Gabriel. Until recently, he was unsure whether Steinbrück would keep his nerve in the face of fierce criticism over his botched start as candidate. Aides say that Gabriel was bordering on panic in the days running up to the election in Lower Saxony.
Steinbrück Seen as Risk Factor
Now, he has one less thing to worry about, but there still remain a host of other concerns surrounding this candidate. On election night, Steinbrück apologized for the lack of “tailwind” from Berlin during the election, and said that he was also aware that he was “partly responsible for that.” It was the euphemism of the month.
The sad reality, though, is that it wasn’t thanks to, but rather despite Steinbrück that the SPD won in Lower Saxony. This man is currently not an asset to his party. That, at least, is the message that leading members of the SPD are conveying. “He hasn’t caused as much damage as we feared,” says an influential party functionary.
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