BERLIN, March 23 (Reuters) – The leaders of Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) said on Monday the party needed to push ahead with promised reforms to tax and social welfare following the “catastrophic” loss in the state election in Rhineland-Palatinate at the weekend.
The vote was the second in a series of five state elections that Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s struggling coalition in Berlin must navigate this year. The result, which saw his Christian Democrat party win the state, offered a boost to his own standing, but threatened to destabilize the coalition by weakening his junior partner further.
Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil and Labour Minister Baerbel Bas, co-leaders of the SDP, said there should be a “hard debate” in the wider leadership group about responsibility for the loss in a state their party had ruled for 35 years.
But they said the situation facing Germany was too serious for “self-lacerating” internal debates about personnel issues while a major package of reforms had to be agreed with their coalition partners in Merz’s conservatives.
The loss, following a disastrous result for the party in the neighbouring state of Baden-Wuerttemberg on March 8, has deepened the crisis facing the SPD since the collapse of the coalition government led by SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2024.
The result has piled pressure on leaders of the party, which has fallen behind the far-right Alternative for Germany in nationwide opinion polls, but there has so far been no sign of any serious internal challenger emerging.
Klingbeil, who called the result in Rhineland-Palatinate “catastrophic”, said the unanimous view of the party’s executive committee was that the best response was not “replacing individuals, but rather by setting a clear programmatic and strategic course.”
Klingbeil said the party leadership as well as SPD ministers, state premiers and other senior party figures will meet on Friday to discuss a package of reforms which would then be discussed with their coalition partners.
(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
