According to his own words, SPD leading candidate Steffen Krach is doing well despite the investigations against him. “I went into politics and I know how politics works,” said Krach on the sidelines of an election campaign event in the Bornholm I allotment garden in Pankow. “I am particularly concerned about protecting my wife and children, and I subordinate everything to that.”
He and his wife try to prevent their older children from reading all the newspaper articles that appear about noise. “We are trying to achieve the greatest possible normality, which is not easy.” It is now also a matter of his lawyer and him being able to access the files. Krach emphasized again that the allegations were not true.
According to his own statements, Krach is accused by the Hanover public prosecutor of having requested a party donation twice in the course of a procurement process. In addition, during his time as president of the Hanover region, he is said to have improperly passed on business secrets in a process to sell a property. The presumption of innocence applies.
Two new surveys show that Krach's SPD has a bad hand in the election to the Berlin House of Representatives on September 20th. In the surveys commissioned by ARD and ZDF, the Social Democrats are, similar to previous surveys, in fifth place with 10 to 12 percent. With 21 to 23 percent, the Left leads ahead of the CDU (20-21 percent), AfD (17-18 percent) and the Greens (16 percent).
The Hanover public prosecutor's office has been investigating Krach since September 3rd. This became known last Wednesday – eleven days before the election. In the middle of the hot election campaign phase, investigators searched Krach's Berlin apartment, offices in Hanover and the headquarters of the Berlin state SPD. According to the public prosecutor's office, they confiscated data carriers and his cell phone, which are now being evaluated.
It was only on Thursday evening that the public prosecutor's office made public the legal allegations it was making against Krach. Krach explained: “The Hanover public prosecutor’s office has informed my lawyer that they are only conducting an investigation concerning me.” On the one hand, it concerns a donation from an entrepreneur to the SPD regional association in Berlin, “which is said to have been requested of me on two occasions in connection with an official procedure”. “On the other hand, it is about an alleged inadmissible disclosure of a bidder’s offer as a business secret in connection with a bidding process for a property.”
The politician was elected regional president of Hanover in 2021. In the summer of 2025, he followed the call of the Berlin SPD to become the top candidate for the election to the House of Representatives, and then took a leave of absence from his work in Hanover in March 2026. After the investigation became known, Krach had already rejected the allegations several times.
He expressed the assessment that it was specifically about a tendering process for the subsequent use of a clinic site in Lehrte near Hanover. As regional president, he was head of the clinic's supervisory board. In a bidding process, two companies competed for the contract. According to Krach, one of the bidders transferred a donation of 9,900 euros to the Berlin SPD, of which he was already acting chairman at the time, while the process was still ongoing. Krach emphasized that he had the donation transferred back immediately at the beginning of January 2026.
What is explosive about the process is that the politician advocated awarding the contract to the bidder in question during the procurement process. From his point of view, his offer was better than that of the other company. However, on February 19, 2026, the supervisory board decided differently and awarded the contract to the second bidder. He abstained from the vote, said Krach. The entrepreneur himself has not yet commented on the donation when asked by dpa. There is now a suspicion that Krach or the Berlin SPD asked the entrepreneur involved twice to donate. The party rejected this, as did Krach himself.
According to its own information, the SPD only solicits donations from Berlin members, for example with letters, emails or via social media. External companies would not be contacted in this way.
Krach himself assured on Thursday that there was no personal contact with bidders during the procurement process. He also rejected claims that he had passed on information from the bidding process to those involved. The SPD politician described the fact that he was being investigated in the middle of the election campaign as a burden. “Of course it’s a burden, I don’t want to downplay that at all,” he said on Friday evening on the sidelines of a campaign appearance.
