When the “Pacifist” Left Wing of Germany’s Spd Rouses Its Old Russophile Demons

The author recounts the scandal caused in Germany by the “pacifist” manifesto of the left wing of the SPD, Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Among the signatories, who advocate avoiding confrontation with Moscow and increasing cooperation with the aggressor country, are well-known political figures. The manifesto builds a bridge between Germany’s far-right and far-left parties and clearly shows the trends at work in several European countries.

The left wing of German social democracy is once again cosying up to Moscow

On the eve of the arrival in Kyiv on June 12 of Boris Pistorius, the Social Democratic Defense Minister of Christian Democratic Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a manifesto bearing the SPD logo entitled “Defense power, arms control, and understanding as factors for peace in Europe” was released in Berlin, radically questioning the foreign policy of the SPD itself and that of the new SPD/CDU-CSU coalition in power.

The document was signed by more than 80 well-known SPD figures representing the party’s pacifist and neutralist left (including Rolf Mützenich, the former head of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag and a long-time proponent of the SPD as a “party of peace and disarmament”; Norbert Walter-Borjans, a former party leader; Hans Eichel, a former federal finance minister from 1999 to 2005; and Julian Nida-Rümelin, a former federal minister of state for culture).

On foreign policy, particularly toward Russia, the signatories of this “manifesto for peace” make proposals that are diametrically opposed to the SPD’s foreign policy guidelines – those that had been painstakingly redefined and agreed upon by all factions of the SPD, including its left wing, at its congress in December 2023.

The proposals in the manifesto are also diametrically opposed to the coalition agreement finalized on April 9 between the SPD and the CDU-CSU—the winners of the February 25 German legislative elections—which led to the inauguration, on May 6, of Friedrich Merz’s “grand coalition” government (the “GroKo,” for “Grosse Koalition”).

In this coalition agreement, the new chancellor made clear his rejection of the endless procrastination between December 2021 and May 2025 by his predecessor, Social Democrat Chancellor Scholz, who had consistently appeased the pacifist wing of his party. Friedrich Merz had made clear in this agreement his desire to give Ukraine the means to better defend itself against Russian aggression.

In line with this, the coalition agreement between the CDU-CSU and SPD proudly declared: “We want to be able to defend ourselves so that we are not forced to defend ourselves.”It clearly identified the adversary: ”Russia poses the most significant and direct threat.”

Finally, it gave Germany the means to catch up quickly in terms of defense, armament, and deterrence by ceasing to subject defense spending to the very restrictive rules of budgetary discipline, so that it could eventually reach between 3 and 5% of GDP if possible.

In stark contrast, the signatories of the June 11 manifesto radically question the guidelines toward Moscow—despite their approval by the SPD

• They now consider these guidelines to be part of a “strategy of military confrontation” and an “irrational logic of excessive armament” (“Hochrüstung”), which they believe is shared and supported by all Western countries.
• They reject the “unilateral accusations” blaming Moscow for starting the war in Ukraine.
• They demand an immediate end to the deployment in Germany of new U.S. medium-range defensive missiles, which was decided during the previous legislature.
• They call for “renewed dialogue with Russia.”
• They suggest immediately launching initial projects with Russia for “technical cooperation in the field of disaster protection and cybersecurity.”
• They call for the development of a collective “common security” system with Moscow.

In fact, what purports to be a policy document from the left wing of the SPD rouses once again the old Russophile demons, now Putin-compatible, of a strong and influential minority of German Social Democrats. But above all, this manifesto, which is imbued with guilty naivety and cynicism, is riddled with unforgivable errors of analysis:

1. It quickly becomes clear that the signatories are nostalgic for the Ostpolitik pursued from 1969 to 1974, to the point of idealizing and sanctifying it. This policy was pursued by a social democrat majority in the name of normalizing relations between West Germany and the Eastern Bloc countries. The signatories of the manifesto succumb too readily to the comfortable lies and illusions of the SPD’s old guard, according to whom only Willy Brandt’s policy of détente brought down the Iron Curtain, when in reality the Soviet bloc collapsed under the combined effect of many other factors (the failure of its economic system, the lost colonial war in Afghanistan, Western pressure, etc.).
2. When they refer to the significant step forward which was the signing in 1987 by the United States and the USSR of the “Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces” (the INF), the signatories of the manifesto fail to mention that, rather than being the result of dialogue alone, this treaty was largely the result of a deliberate policy of confrontation toward the Soviet Union by Ronald Reagan, consisting of economic pressure, military deterrence, and ideological firmness.
3. And when they wish to return to the concept of “common security” that was emblematic of the 1975 signing of the CSCE Final Act in Helsinki and the subsequent decades of East-West détente, they fail to note that today’s world is no longer the same as it was in 1970: more specifically, they fail to recognize that at the beginning of the Ostpolitik, the Soviet Union and the West did not question borders as they were at the time—whereas today, on the contrary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia absolutely does not accept the existing borders in Europe. How, then, can we still talk of “common security?”
4. The call by the SPD’s pacifist Social Democrats to reverse former Chancellor Scholz’s decision to station new U.S. missiles on German territory conveniently ignores the deployment of Russian weapons, ordered years ago by Vladimir Putin, this time offensive weapons, on the borders of NATO countries bordering Russia.
5. Finally, when they urge Germany in particular—and the West in general—to negotiate for peace, one wonders with whom exactly they would like us to negotiate, given that Vladimir Putin has clearly rejected any proposal for a ceasefire or peace talks, whether from Volodymyr Zelensky or Donald Trump.
6. Ironically, the “doves” who signed this manifesto of the SPD left—who would like to promote a policy of appeasement with Russia—published it at the very moment of Russia’s most devastating and deadly attacks against Ukraine (a record was set on the night of July 3 with 550 missiles and drones of all kinds).
7. The appeal does not contain a single word about the war crimes, crimes against humanity, massive destruction and massacres for which Russia is responsible in Ukraine.
8. Nor does it say anything about the very nature of the regime in power in Russia.
9. Not a word about Vladimir Putin’s refusal to accept peace negotiations or about the intensification of Moscow’s destabilization and disinformation campaigns against Western countries.
10. And nothing, not the slightest analysis, on the obvious failure of the social-democratic mantra—which was also taken up by Angela Merkel’s CDU during her long term as chancellor—of “Wandel durch Annäherung” (i.e., change through gradual rapprochement) and “Wandel durch Handel (i.e., change through trade), which has been consigned to the history books since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
11. On the contrary, acting as if Russia’s war of aggression and annexation in Ukraine were already a thing of the past, the manifesto recommends nothing less than a “gradual return to cooperation with Russia.”
12. Finally, one is left stunned upon reading this “peace manifesto” to find almost word for word the clichés of Russian propaganda intended to legitimize the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as well as to read all the reasons why NATO is in fact responsible for triggering and shaping events in Ukraine.

Who are the authors and signatories of the SPD’s “peace manifesto”?

One could certainly take comfort in the fact that only a minority of the SPD is involved.

The document comes from one of the many think tanks and pacifist circles gravitating around the SPD, the “Erhard Eppler – Kreis” named after a former Social Democrat federal minister who was a pacifist. Its initiators are the two co-chairs of this circle, themselves SPD members of the Bundestag: Gernot Erler and Ralf Stegner.

(Stegner, a member of the parliamentary body responsible for overseeing the German secret services during the previous legislative term, recently made a secret visit to a luxury hotel in Baku for a “purely private” meeting with senior Russian officials close to the Kremlin, probably investors, without being subjected to any investigation whatsoever.)

The third man behind the document is Rolf Mützenich, mentioned above. Just before the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s troops in 2022, he invoked “Russia’s legitimate security interests” (but not those of Ukraine).

The document was mainly signed by the old guard of the pacifist left wing who have had their day – happy to take revenge on new SPD leader Lars Klingbeil, who had marginalized them in recent months by “cleaning up” the party, removing a number of them from key positions and replacing them with his loyalists.

In fact, 80% of registered Social Democrat activists were in favor of the coalition and the government agreement between the SPD and CDU-CSU last April. And none of the party’s current leaders signed the manifesto: only 5% of active SPD elected officials did.

A minority, perhaps, but an active minority.

The old demons of the SPD’s pro-Russian wing are back

As Johannes Bockenheimer rightly points out in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the publication of the manifesto is a painful and untimely reminder of how long the list of social democrat leaders who champion German-Russian dialogue is, having compromised themselves with Moscow for decades, sometimes even renouncing the SPD’s own principles—those Social Democrat figures whom the German language, with its wealth of lexical expressions, readily refers to as “Russland-Versteher” (those who  always show great understanding for Russia), or even “Russland-Verharmloser” (those who trivialize Russia’s power to cause harm).

We will mention just a few for the record:

• Starting with former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, from 1998 to 2005, who had no qualmspublicly defending the devastating war launched by Vladimir Putin in Chechnya in 1999, and who, shortly after leaving office, accepted the presidency of the German-Russian consortium managing the Nord Stream gas pipeline, in exchange for very generous financial compensation paid by Russia, and who saw fit to condemn, just before February 24, 2022, the “sound of boots” he believed he heard in Ukraine – without a word about the Russian troops already massed on the borders of that country to invade it;
• Former Foreign Minister and current Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who in 2016, two years after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, still condemned “the sound of boots orchestrated by NATO,” and who in 2021 praised Nord Stream 2 as “the last bridge connecting Russia to Europe”;
• Former Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel: a member of a German government that approved EU sanctions against Russia after its annexation of Crimea, he spoke out against these same sanctions at the Munich Security Conference in 2018;
• Manuela Schwesig, Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a fervent initiator and supporter of the creation in Schwerin, in early 2021, of the Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection (Stiftung Umwelt- und Klimaschutzprojekte), 99% funded by Russia, a kind of front company less concerned with environmental protection than with circumventing U.S. sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and helping to complete it;
• .Not to mention the powerful Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a traditional mouthpiece for the SPD, which has continued, even after the annexation of Crimea, to promote the narrative of Russia as an “indispensable and exemplary partner” in geopolitical dialogue.

A few words about former SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is not included in this list. However, despite his famous speech on February 27, 2022, on the “Zeitenwende” – the change of era – announcing, among other things, a special fund of €100 billion for the Bundeswehr, Chancellor Scholz set an ambiguous course for the SPD, anxious not to challenge Vladimir Putin too much, categorically refusing to deliver German Taurus missiles with a range of more than 500 kilometers to Ukraine, and choosing to appear in his latest campaign for the February 2025 legislative elections as a “Friedenskanzler “ (i.e., the chancellor of peace and negotiation).

The legacy of what has now come to be known as ”The Moscow Connection” (after the title of a best-selling book published in May 2023, whose eloquent subtitle is: The Schröder Network and Germany’s Path to Dependency).

Will the new SPD leader Lars Klingbeil be able to avoid the trap and prevent a fratricidal debate within the party over its foreign policy?

Lars Klingbeil, 45, the skilled and powerful co-chair of the SPD since December 2021 alongside Saskia Esken, and who has been nothing less than vice-chancellor and federal finance minister in Friedrich Merz’s government since May 6, was himself once an advocate of closer ties with Russia as Gerhard Schröder’s former right-hand man.

He has since distanced himself from this position, pushing through a motion at the party congress in December 2023 that announced a clear reorientation of its foreign policy, summarized by the following objective: “Today, we must organize our security vis-à-vis Russia.“

Lars Klingbeil has set himself the goal of reducing internal squabbling within the Social Democrat Party to make it more credible as a coalition partner and halt its decline. But the task will now be even more complicated.

The date of publication of the manifesto of the SPD’s “Russophile wing” on June 11 was by no means a coincidence.

This manifesto aimed to reignite the old debate on Russia on the eve of the NATO summit in The Hague on June 24 and 25, 2025.

It also and above all aimed to impose a new policy debate at the SPD’s next federal congress in Berlin from June 27 to 29.

All of this conveniently allowed the pro-Moscow wing of the party to punish Lars Klingbeil for sidelining many of its members from prominent positions and to try to trip him up along with his entire leadership team, at a time when the SPD is struggling to recover from the worst result this major party has ever achieved in a general election, on February 23: only 16.4% of the vote, giving it 120 seats in the Bundestag, far behind the CDU-CSU, which came out on top with 28.5% of the vote, and 208 seats, and, utter humiliation, behind the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the very young far-right party, which won 20.8% of the vote and 152 seats in the new legislature.

The publication of the Moscow-compatible manifesto immediately sparked a public outcry in Germany.

Boris Pistorius, who was already a Social Democrat Defense Minister under Olaf Scholz and who has been reappointed by the new Christian Democrat Chancellor Merz, seized the opportunity to retort that “with Putin, we can only negotiate from a position of strength.” The CDU-CSU, the majority partner in the German government coalition, also sought to set the record straight through its foreign policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter: “When will people understand that Russia does not want to negotiate and does not want peace?”

On the left, Britta Hasselmann, speaking for the Green parliamentary group, was as clear on Russia as Chancellor Scholz’s former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, the leading figure of the German Greens in the previous government coalition, had always been: ”All attempts […] to organize peace talks have been thwarted and rejected by President Putin.“

The June 14 issue of Der Spiegel magazine devoted its editorial to the initiative of the SPD’s left, headlining it “The manifesto of the incorrigible.” The left-wing daily Tageszeitung (TAZ) called it a “manifesto of denial of reality,” emphasizing “the signatories’ misjudgment of the reality of the Russian regime, a truly murderous regime.”

However, we should not underestimate the resonance that the pacifist theses of the manifesto may have.

As early as March 14, 2024, the SPD parliamentary group led by a reluctant Chancellor Scholz, but also and above all by Rolf Mützenich, the future co-initiator of the June 11 manifesto, already helped to block a motion by the Christian Democrat CDU calling for Germany to deliver the Taurus missiles that Ukraine was urgently requesting. Mützenich, buoyed by this success in the Bundestag, had also called for “knowing how to freeze and then end a war.” He was given a standing ovation and followed by a motley alliance of the far-right AfD, Die Linke (a far-left party similar to France’s LFI party), and Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW (a very recent nationalist-populist party claiming to be left-wing, but which, having failed to reach the magic 5% threshold in the last legislative elections, was unable to send any members to the Bundestag). Mützenich was congratulated by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin – that says it all.

This is the result of the prevailing confusion in Germany, as elsewhere, or the resurgence of collusion between extremes against democratic forces, as we saw in pre-Hitler Germany in the early 1930s. The “pacifist manifesto” of the SPD’s Russophile wing on June 11 puts forward theses and demands, some of which are absolutely identical to those of the young German radical right-wing party, the AfD, led by Alice Weidel.

The German far left and far right are therefore dangerously converging on a line of pacifism and defeatist neutrality in the face of Russia’s new imperialism.

As for the brand new German “catch-all” party that emerged from the Marxist-leaning, but also nationalist-sovereignist, far left, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), it espouses the same ideas. We have already explained how Sahra Wagenknecht allied herself with the oldest and most famous German feminist activist, Alice Schwarzer, to give the widest possible media coverage, on two occasions – in February 2023 and on August 23, 2024 – to a “Manifesto for Peace” which demanded nothing less than the total withdrawal of support for Ukraine and an end to all Western military aid to the country.

However, the June 11 manifesto of the SPD’s pacifist wing bears disturbing similarities to Sahra Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer’s “Manifesto for Peace”. There is clearly an attempt by both the AfD and the BSW to exploit the fears felt by so many German citizens that Germany, located in the center of Europe and designated by Moscow as one of its main adversaries, if not its main adversary, is particularly exposed and threatened by a widespread Russian nuclear attack—an anxiety-provoking narrative that is fueled by repeated statements from Putin’s entourage and disinformation campaigns led by the Kremlin.

Both the AfD and the BSW feed on this attitude, which is extremely widespread among the German population, combining a desire for peace, pacifism, and denial of reality, leading many Germans to believe that Western countries should reach out to Russia to end the war in Ukraine and avoid a conflict between NATO and Moscow, and to prefer diplomatic solutions to any policy of firmness or even confrontation toward Russia.

The pacifist fringe of the SPD is also exploiting this attitude and these fears – as it did long ago, during the huge demonstrations against the deployment of U.S. Pershing II missiles in Germany and the implementation of NATO’s “double decision” following Leonid Brezhnev’s installation of Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles in the USSR’s satellite countries, medium-range missiles aimed at West European countries.

There is therefore cause for concern that Vladimir Putin and the ideologues and advisers surrounding him, while welcoming the fresh support they are receiving from the left wing of the SPD, may be tempted to exploit the disastrous convergence of views between several parties and currents in Germany which, under the guise of pacifism, are advocating the “Munich option” toward Russia.

Will the German political class be able to resist the temptation of defeatism?

In the immediate term, the June 11 manifesto will force the SPD leadership to abandon the ambiguity maintained by Chancellor Scholz during his term of office (from December 2021 to May 6, 2025) and oblige Lars Klingbeil, the party leader, to clearly confirm the new direction of his foreign policy, announced in December 2023. He will have to explain the compelling reasons why Germany needs to strengthen its defense capabilities and catch up in terms of armament.

Nevertheless, German politicians would be well advised to take the concerns expressed in this manifesto seriously and tirelessly explain to the general public that it is not the West that threatens peace in Europe today, but Russia.

A warning for other socialist and social democrat parties in Europe?

The temptation to retreat, to “pacifism,” to oppose rearmament, to negotiate at any price with the Kremlin dictator, to adopt the “Munich reflex,” is evident in all European far-right parties.

On the face of it, it seems more unlikely in “left-wing,” socialist, or social democrat parties. However, it manifests itself in the same way, as demonstrated by the attempt made by the left wing of the German SPD in its June 11 manifesto.

The publication of this manifesto should therefore alert all European democracies, and especially the social democrat parties in those countries which, like Germany, are confronted with contradictory currents:

• Isn’t the Italian Democratic Party divided between the pacifism of its left wing and the support for Ukraine of its more centrist members?
• Isn’t the Spanish PSOE in favor of a significant increase in investment in security and strategic autonomy, against the opinion of its ally, the radical left-wing party Sumar, some of whose representatives are even talking about a possible withdrawal from NATO?
• Are the French Social Democrats within the Socialist Party not urging Europe to help Kyiv “to the end” (Raphaël Glucksmann on March 4, 2025), in the face of former socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who professes, on behalf of LFI, which he leads, the simplistic slogan “Withdrawal from NATO, non-alignment, alter-globalization and mutual aid,” and who has already been heard generously offering Russia Ukrainian territories that would naturally belong to it?

There are other examples. The publication of the “manifesto” of the German pacifist and neutralist left wing of the SPD is by no means a German problem.