MARTIN SCHULZ baffled many, particularly outside Germany, with his call yesterday for a United States of Europe by 2025. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader was addressing his party’s conference from a position of weakness, following its worst election result (20.5%) in post-war history and ahead of a crucial vote of delegates on whether or not to talk to the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance about another grand coalition. Why this, now? What was he up to?

It helps to revisit a scene from his doomed election campaign, documented by Markus Feldenkirchen of Der Spiegel. It was June. The initial surge of support for the SPD following Mr Schulz’s emergence as its chancellor candidate earlier in the year—the “Schulz hype”—had faded. How to recapture that energy? In a meeting at the SPD’s headquarters, Mr Schulz insisted on going big in his upcoming speech to the party’s pre-election conference. He would be authentic, “visionary”even. He would speak from the heart as a convinced European and demand a United States of Europe. He would contrast this commitment with the vague, tactical inoffensiveness of Angela Merkel.

Several days later his team came back with a version of the speech shorn of the daring bits, including the call for United States of Europe. They informed a despondent Mr Schulz that, according to party research, voters did not want confrontation. The SPD conference that followed was a Merkel-ishly anodyne affair, one of many such moments in which the former European Parliament president seemed incapable of speaking in his own voice, transfixed by the chancellor’s popularity and crippled by caution. He barely mentioned the subject on which he is most authoritative and passionate: the EU and Germany’s vocation within it.

At the election the SPD lost votes to parties of all political shades. But a common criticism among deserting voters was that it did not seem to know for what it stood. That the arithmetic of the result made possible a “Jamaica”coalition of the CDU/CSU, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Greens was thus also a blessed consolation; the Social Democrats immediately announced they would return to opposition, to rebuild and rediscover their identity.

But the collapse of Jamaica talks on November 19th forced the party—under intense pressure to provide a stable government for Europe’s largest economy—to contemplate a third round of coalition with Mrs Merkel. Mr Schulz was among the SPD leaders most loth to take this step, fearing that another punishing four years of government could finish off the party as a leading force in German politics. Weakened, reluctant and facing an anti-coalition insurgency from his party’s youth branch, he needed a story to tell about this volte-face; a cause of such magnitude that the SPD could justify a return to government on new terms; a grand project around which the party could erect a cordon and proclaim: this is ours.

Such were the circumstances, yesterday, in which Mr Schulz revived the speech he had been persuaded not to give in the summer: the speech making the idealistic social-democratic case for a federal Europe. The SPD’s leader began with an apology for the election result so grovelling that Die Welt compared it to a “lachrymose therapy session”. Then came the redemption stage: “People, Europe is our life insurance! It's the only chance we have of keeping up with the other great regions of the world.”Only with a federal Europe, said Mr Schulz in a passage aimed squarely at the SPD’s coalition-sceptic left, could Germany and its neighbours confront common challenges like tax evasion, corporate abuses and migration crisis: “the continent cannot afford four more years of German European policy à la Schäuble” (a reference to Wolfgang Schäuble, Mrs Merkel’s former finance minister).

Emmanuel Macron loomed large. Mr Schulz echoed the French president’s commitment to a convention of European civic society. His talk of a federal moment by 2025 reflected Mr Macron’s timetable (the president wants to achieve several of his more integrationist proposals by 2024). His bizarre—and indeed illegal—demand that countries that do not endorse a new constitution be ejected from the EU was, it seems, a clumsy attempt to align his ideas with Mr Macron’s vision of a multi-speed Europe, with a core moving faster towards integration than other parts.

There were two main audiences. The first, principal one, was the party—and particularly the delegates in the hall. Mr Schulz was telling them something like: “You and I, comrades, we are not the mushy technocrats of public imagination but idealists. We have a vision of how the world could be different, a big idea. And it follows from this that we will stand up to CDU/CSU like we have not done in the past; we do grand coalition differently next time.”It worked. Delegates voted by about 2:1 for exploratory and “open-ended”(i.e. coalition-oriented) talks with Mrs Merkel and 82% of them voted for Mr Schulz to remain leader, albeit from a menu of one.

The second audience was the sort of voter that the SPD needs in order to hit the mid-20s vote share needed to show it is still in the game (if not the 30-40% at which the chancellery comes into reach). That voter, the lowest-hanging fruit, is the sort of well-educated, probably public-sector urban type whom Mr Schulz should have won over easily but who abandoned the SPD for Mrs Merkel’s liberalised CDU, the Greens or the Left in September election. One lesser-noted achievement of his speech was that Alexander Dobrindt, the CSU transport minister and the sort of right-wing politician whom a distinctive, self-confident SPD probably ought to put off, attacked Mr Schulz’s wide-eyed proposal as that of a “Europe radical”.

Yet one speech does not a relaunch make. It is covered in today’s German newspapers, but without much fanfare. Mrs Merkel yesterday merely brushed aside Mr Schulz’s talk of a federal Europe, saying the EU should concentrate on improving its practical “ability to act”, not long-term visions. Judging by his lacklustre election campaign Mr Schulz has a habit of flitting restlessly between subjects without prosecuting any long enough to make an impact and a habit of letting his rhetoric get far ahead of the substance (his lofty talk of rewriting Germany’s social contract was not borne out in his party’s modest social-justice proposals, for example). Anyone in the German political establishment can speak nice words and grand ideals on Europe and many have been doing so in recent weeks. Fewer are offering much serious detail.

In so far as Mr Schulz has hit on a new way of distinguishing himself and his party, then—and he is not overwhelmed by alternative options—he needs to stick at it. This is not to say he needs to keep banging on about a United States of Europe; in any case this will not be on the table in his talks with Mrs Merkel, even as an abstract goal. But the SPD cannot expect the topic of “Europe”to provide it with any new political cover in a grand coalition without some at least moderately ambitious and concrete proposals.

What does a Europe àla Schulz look like in the next three to four years? The SPD says it agrees with Mr Macron about the need for a euro-zone finance minister, but with what powers and what statutory footing? It talks nebulously of new investments, but on what scale and with what financing? Where does it stand on European Commission proposls like a “stabilisation fund”for troubled member economies? Is the SPD for treaty change? How would it complete the banking union? Is it prepared to challenge the anti-burden-sharing rhetoric of the FDP and the likes of Mr Schäuble? Will it attempt to shift public opinion in Germany—ambivalent at best on the subject of euro-zone reform—by confronting voters with hard but honest truths about European expectations on the country? Will it admit to them that a more integrated and self-sufficient Europe requires greater German defence and security commitments? Will it make SPD control of the the finance ministry a red line in the new grand-coalition talks?

The presence or absence of serious answers to these questions, much more than any big talk of a European federation, are the measure by which the SPD’s reinvention as the party of German Europeanism should and will be judged.

It has not made the task easy for itself. If the party had done anything much to distinguish itself from the CDU/CSU on Europe in its previous two coalitions with Mrs Merkel, or made anything more than a passing reference to the subject in its summer election campaign, it would be in a much stronger position to advance this cause now. The SPD has created an unenviable situation for itself. It must make the best of it.