The SPD's first post-war Chancellor was the legendary Willy Brandt. He is most noted for a foreign policy paradigm shift of normalising relations with the East Bloc. Yet his undoing as chancellor was the unmasking of a high-profile East German spy in his personal staff. Brand's successor was Helmut Schmidt, from the party's right wing, both economically and in foreign policy (he used to be the SPD faction's hawkish foreign policy specialist), who prides himself of the behind-the-scenes instigation of the NATO Double-Track Decision that kicked off the eighties arms race (for details see this comment).

These two men continued to define the party into the Kohl era: Brandt remained party boss until 1987, while Schmidt became chief editor of liberal weekly Die Zeit and influenced a number of SPD leaders (including one youngster named Gerhard Schröder). Now Gesine Schwan was one of the latter: she was a founder of the SPD's right wing (the so-called Seeheimer Kreis = Seeheim Circle), an avowed Catholic, a vocal anti-communist and NATO supporter, and a loud critic of Brandt's line. But Brandt gained overhand by 1984, when Schwan wasn't re-elected into the SPD's policy-setting "Basic Values Commission", in practice ending her career as politician.

Still, two decades later, Schwan's relations with the post-communist PDS (one of the originators of the Left Party) weren't that frosty. In the 2004 vote for President, she lost to Horst Köhler 589:604 - presumably collecting the votes of all SPD (458), Green (90), Danish minority (1) and PDS (31) voters present (plus at least 9 right-wingers or liberals). And upon declaring her cnadidature in 2009, Schwan said (watch video in the Die Welt article):