Juso Congress: Criticism of the Chancellor's absence
Labour Minister Hubertus Heil will be there, as will party leader Saskia Esken and General Secretary Kevin Kühnert: it's not as if the SPD celebrities will be ignoring the Young Socialists' national congress, which runs from Friday to Sunday. But for the second time in a row, one is missing from the Juso annual conference: Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz turned down the invitation to Braunschweig some time ago for scheduling reasons.
This has now led to criticism from the SPD's youth association, which has around 70,000 members and, with 49 MPs, makes up almost a quarter of the parliamentary group. "I would have thought it would have been right if Olaf Scholz had faced up to the discussion with us at the Juso national congress," said board member Philipp Türmer, who is running for the Juso chairmanship on Friday, to the German Press Agency.
In particular, there is "enormous resentment" among the Jusos about the Chancellor's recent statements on "deportations on a grand scale". "However, I am sure that the messages and demands of the Jusos from this congress will be so loud that he will take notice of them - no matter where he is."
Scholz had said in a Spiegel interview: "We must finally deport those who have no right to stay in Germany on a large scale." Several Jusos had criticized this in no uncertain terms. Türmer wrote on Platform X: "I could puke at this quote." The comment on the Jusos' central X account was also strong: "A demand straight out of the vocabulary of the right-wing mob," it said. "What is completely lost? That social democracy means politics with humanitarian values."
Scholz's absence is not unusual
Scholz was deputy federal chairman of the Jusos from 1982 to 1988 and later repeatedly attended federal congresses in various capacities, most recently in 2021 shortly before he was sworn in as chancellor. Last year, however, he stayed away from the federal congress, and this time too, the Chancellor's Office of the SPD Executive Board announced: "Other appointments have already been arranged for a longer period of time, so it is not possible for Mr. Scholz to attend the federal congress of the Jusos. The exchange with the Juso federal executive will of course continue in the future."
In any case, it is not unusual for a chancellor to turn down the Jusos. Despite intensive archive research, the youth association's press office was unable to find a single appearance by Gerhard Schröder at a Juso federal congress during his seven years as chancellor. And Schröder has an even higher-ranking Juso past than Scholz: he was head of the association from 1978 to 1980.
Despite Scholz's history with the Jusos, his absence from the annual conference is not unprecedented. In fact, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder did not attend any Juso federal congress during his seven-year term.
Source: www.dpa.com
