Germans pining for Gerhard Schröder forget his errors and ties to Putin. The SPD needs a fresh approach | Katja Hoyer

The former chancellor was the chief architect of Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels and cuts to defence spending. Both haunt the country today

The former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is enjoying a curious political revival. Not so long ago, his reputation seemed in tatters. In light of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many came to regard his longstanding ties to Russia and personal friendship with Vladimir Putin as self-serving. Fellow Social Democrats (SPD) tried to expel him from the party, and as recently as last year the government defunded the ex-chancellor’s office.

And yet a veritable Schröder nostalgia is now seeping into German political discourse, a phenomenon that’s less to do with a reappraisal of his chancellorship than with a desperate identity crisis on the centre-left.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. She is the author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990. Her latest book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, comes out in May