The rumours have been swirling for weeks that Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, would be the SPD's pick for Chancellor at elections next year.
Now it's been confirmed, along with the news that SPD leader Kurt Beck is resigning.
The SPD has been so beleaguered for so long that it's often hard to remember that it's actually a party of power, in the grand coalition with the CDU. It hardly seems that way, and the fault for that has largely been pinned on Beck, who has been so comprehensively outgunned by Angela Merkel.
Such was Beck's staggering unpopularity that it was widely assumed Steinmeier would carry the SPD's chancellor hopes next year. But somehow, in one of those acts of self-deception of which political parties the world over seem capable, the fact that he was not deemed the best choice for Germany's top job was supposed to have no impact on his ability to run the SPD.
Of course it did. Beck's only defence as Steinmeier cleaned up was that while the FM could play the charismatic media-friendly smoothie role required of all chancellors, he would be the dour ideologue without whom Frank-Walter would be nothing. They might as well have called themselves Tony and Gordon.
But the reality is that Kurt/Gordon was utterly unable to provide the ideological leadership role either, and indeed it was this that his party needed more than anything.
For if the SPD is in a crisis, which it is, it is because it does not know whether it is a traditional (pre-Tony) left wing party defending trade unions and workers' rights, or a modern left wing party (post-Tony) that embraces a little of the reverse.
Mr Blair was lucky in having only had rebels within his party to deal with when moulding New Labour.
Since crafting its own welfare reforms, known as Agenda 2010, the SPD has had plenty of those too. But it also has neo-commnist party Die Linke, ready to scoop up all those disaffected by the changes. Die Linke is now only a couple of points behind the SPD. It's a bit as if, instead of powering him to number 10, Blair found all his modernising efforts only transformed Dave Spart into a serious political player.
How to respond to Die Linke? Steer the SPD to the left or to the centre? Beck seemed unable to master his own party on the issue. But there will be no more doubts. His replacement as party chief, as its ideological chief, is Franz Müntefering, perhaps the leading reformist in the SPD. Given that Steinmeier was chef de cabinet during the Schröder chancellorship which drove through Agenda 2010, the party's leadership is now unambiguously, furiously, centrist.
Beck strove to keep his party together by compromise. Will we now see these two, Müntefering and Steinmeier, seek to repair the SPD's fortunes through confrontation - both with their critics inside the party, and with Die Linke, ?
