2019 Social Democratic Party of Germany leadership election

2019 Social Democratic Party of Germany leadership election

← 2018 14 October – 30 November 2019 6–8 December (confirmation) 2021 →
Turnout	226,775 (53.3%) (first round) 230,215 (54.1%) (second round)
Candidate Norbert Walter-Borjans Saskia Esken Olaf Scholz Klara Geywitz First round 44,967 48,473 First round % 21.0% 22.7% Second round 114,995 98,246 Second round % 53.1% 45.3%
Leader before election Malu Dreyer (acting) Elected Leader Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans

The 2019 Social Democratic Party of Germany leadership election took place in the autumn of 2019 to elect the new leadership of the Social Democratic Party of Germany following the resignation of the Andrea Nahles on 3 June 2019. Although the leadership of the party is elected indirectly by a party convention,^[1] for the first time since 1993 the SPD held a vote by the membership to decide the candidates which the party's executive board will propose to the party convention. Though the convention was not obliged to elect the proposed candidates, the membership vote was considered politically binding.^[2] For the first time, dual candidacies were permitted, provided they comprised one man and one woman. Most hopeful candidates ran in pairs, and no single applicants advanced to the ballot.

The membership vote was held in two rounds, with the top two tickets from the first round proceeding to a runoff. In the first round held between 14 and 25 October, Olaf Scholz and Klara Geywitz placed first with 22.7% of the vote, while Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Esken placed second with 21.0%. In the second round, Walter-Borjans and Esken won with 53.1% of the vote to Scholz and Geywitz's 45.3%.

This was seen as an upset victory for the left-wing of the SPD, including skeptics of the grand coalition with the CDU. Esken and Walter-Borjans were little-known to the public at large, Esken being a backbencher in the Bundestag and Walter-Borjans being the former Minister of Finance of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2010 to 2017. Scholz, the incumbent Vice-Chancellor a business-friendly fiscal conservative, had the backing of much of the party establishment, including General-Secretary Lars Klingbeil and several Ministers-President such as Stephan Weil^[3] and Hamburg First Mayor Peter Tschentscher.

In December 2019, the SPD party convention elected Walter-Borjans and Esken as the new co-leaders of the party. Though they had previously hinted an end to the grand coalition with the CDU, they backed away from that, first proposing a revision of the coalition agreement. The CDU did not accept this, but the party nonetheless continued the coalition.^[4]

Walter-Borjans and Esken proved to be unpopular and barely-known leaders and their parties poll numbers did not recover from the low to mid tens.^[5] In August 2020, Walter-Borjans and Esken nominated the much more popular Scholz to be their Chancellor candidate^[6] for which they were widely mocked.^[7] However, in near the end of the 2021 German federal election, Scholz's personal popularity fueled a sudden surge of the SPD in the polls, leading to their victory and, eventually, Scholz becoming Chancellor.

Scholz's running mate, Klara Geywitz, who had lost her seat in the Landtag of Brandenburg during the campaign and went to work for the Brandenburg Court of Audit, would later be appointed Minister for Housing, Urban Development and Building by Scholz to his cabinet.