Olaf Scholz has just pulled out of the coalition government, lost his parliamentary majority, and opinion polls predict his party will be defeated in Germany’s next snap election. However, he is still likely to be chosen as the party’s candidate for prime minister.
The government crisis, which culminated last week with Scholz calling for time for the three-party alliance, has plunged Germany into a new phase of turmoil. But Social Democratic leaders rallied around him, stabilizing his position within a party that had long cultivated suspicions about the prime minister.
Some Social Democrats hope that the still popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius will be voted in to replace him. But they are in the minority. Most expect an SPD congress to be held in the coming weeks to appoint Scholz as a member of the party. Kanzler Kandidat — Regardless of his approval rating.
Support for Scholz was on full display at an emotional meeting of the SPD parliamentary group last week, where he received a standing ovation from members of Congress.
Jens Spahn, a member of parliament from the opposition Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and former health minister, described the scene as “surreal”.
“Here we have a failed prime minister named Olaf Scholz. His coalition government just collapsed, he was replaced as finance minister, and his SPD thinks it’s a celebration?” Spahn said. told the Financial Times.
Opposition parties’ distrust was further heightened by a television interview with Scholz on Sunday night, in which he refused to admit mistakes and appeared in the view of some commentators to be callous and unsympathetic.
Some openly question why the party still supports Scholz. TV host Mickey Weisenhertz compared him to Bruce Willis in the movie. sixth sense. He wrote to X, “Even though he has been dead for a long time, I still go to work every day.” “He just doesn’t realize it yet.”
Just a few months ago, Scholz’s position was precarious. Some within the SPD blame him for the party’s slumping approval ratings, which according to opinion polls have ranged from 14 to 16 percent over the past year, far behind the CDU’s 30 to 32 percent.
However, Scholz’s standing among some party members has paradoxically improved since the fall of his government. They hail him as a hero who finally put a scalpel to the boil, ending a dysfunctional government riven by ideological conflicts.
For them, the dismissal of Finance Minister Christian Lindner, leader of the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), was the inevitable climax of months of provocation.
“We are relieved that we will no longer be subjected to endless humiliation by Mr. Lindner and the FDP,” said one SPD member.
Scholz said he fired Lindner because he refused to suspend the “debt brake” (Germany’s constitutional limit on new borrowing) that would have allowed more funding to be provided to Ukraine. . The issue has taken on added urgency since US voters re-elected Donald Trump, who had questioned Western aid to Kiev.
This dismissal had a positive impact on the SPD’s grassroots. “This was a kind of liberation. It was long overdue,” said Dirk Smackzny, head of the party’s local branch in Rheinhausen-Mitte, near the industrial city of Duisburg in the Ruhr region. “We have been waiting for Mr. Scholz to provide strong leadership for a long time, and he has finally provided it.”
“He could have said, ‘Let’s just get through one more year,'” said senior SPD member Johannes Fechner. “The fact that he has accepted that this country needs a new government, even if it means losing his job. SPD rank-and-file members really respect him for that.”
However, Scholz remains controversial within the party. Closely associated with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s labor market reforms in the early 2000s that alienated working-class voters, he ran for leadership in 2019 but lost in a humiliating defeat.
Two years later, he made a remarkable comeback, running for prime minister in 2021 and winning. He then brought together the SPD, FDP and Greens into a coalition government unique in German history.
But his record has been clouded by countless internal conflicts over economic policy, which he has tried to mediate but ultimately failed. Scholz had the worst approval ratings of any postwar prime minister.
On Monday, two SPD politicians from the prime minister’s hometown of Hamburg, Markus Schreiber and Tim Stobelok, said the prime minister should make way for the defense minister.
“Our chances of winning the election, or at least doing better, are [Pistorius]”He has long been Germany’s most popular politician,” they wrote on Instagram.
Mr. Scholz spent too much time crafting a compromise “in technocratic terms” that was later rejected by his coalition partners. “We believe that the negative image that the people of this country have of him can no longer be repaired,” they wrote.
Privately, some SPD MPs agreed that Pistorius might be the better choice. “But politics doesn’t work that way,” said one. “Scholz’s big strategic advantage is that he holds the reins of power. It was he who took this step. It was he who announced the early elections. That gives him a certain strength. ”
Mr. Scholz has no intention of standing aside or putting his candidacy on a party vote.
His spokesman Steffen Hebestreit defended the lack of a formal selection process on Monday, saying there was no need or time for one.
“First of all, he is the prime minister, so he is the natural candidate,” he told reporters. “Secondly, look at the clock. . . . If he loses the vote of confidence, there will be a snap election soon. We all need to focus on that now, but why? I hope you understand.”
Officials said the approach makes sense, especially given what happened in the United States.
Wolfgang Schroeder, a political scientist at the University of Kassel, said Democrats had hoped to improve their fortunes by replacing Kamala Harris with Joe Biden months before the election. .
“There was some momentum injected, but it didn’t last long and it wasn’t effective,” he said. “I would therefore advise the SPD not to conduct any large-scale experiments at this time.”
MPs from the opposition CDU party say it suits them and expect Scholz to be soundly defeated by party leader Friedrich Merz. “Olav Scholz is the face of failure,” said Spahn of the CDU. “So I couldn’t ask for a better opponent.”
