Do we like them?

Do we like Lars Klingbeil?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful of his own turned up, but the record on people and the planet is thin, so we can't go higher.

Klingbeil is the guy holding the German government's purse. He's been Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister since May 2025 under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and he's co-leader of the centre-left SPD. He's a politician through and through, not an economist: he studied political science, sociology and history.

His pitch has always been bridge-builder. After the 2025 election he built a friendly rapport with Merz, who leads a rival party, during the coalition talks. That's how a weakened SPD ended up in government, with Klingbeil running a spending push worth hundreds of billions of euros on the military and infrastructure.

The recent stuff is about survival. The SPD has been struggling in the polls and lost a state election in Rhineland-Palatinate earlier this year, and in October his co-leader Bärbel Bas resigned. She said she had faced increasing public attacks, including from the conservative bloc. Klingbeil said the whole leadership would stand for election at a full party conference, and told reporters “We are competitors, and we need a culture of debate.”

On the harm test, I didn't find anything harmful of his own. That includes LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants and the planet. I also couldn't read the key pages in full, so treat it as a thin file. One item, about a rainbow flag at the Finance Ministry, came only from partisan outlets, so I've left it out. As a senior SPD figure his job involves hard calls on migration and spending, and where you land on those depends on your politics.

On the good-person test, the record is quiet in a good way: no court cases or dodgy-conduct stories turned up in what I could check. The flip side is that there's little detail on how he treats staff, or on any cost he's paid for standing up for others. That's an honest gap, not a clean bill of health.