German Chancellor Olaf Scholz refuses to give in

In September 2024, Olaf Scholz brushed aside a journalist's question about his legacy.

"I think you should be wary of politicians who think about that before their term in office has ended," he told Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper in response to the question of what he hoped would one day be written in the history books about his chancellorship.

By now, he may be beginning to ponder that question. Last November, his three-way coalition with his center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the neo-liberal Free Democrats (FDP) collapsed and early elections were scheduled for February 23.

In polls, his center-left SPD is trailing behind the center-right bloc of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU). If there is no major turnaround, Scholz will have had the shortest term of office of all German chancellors over the last five decades.

The stoic optimist

But Scholz is still set on victory. He remains as unfazed as he was in the 2021 elections, when the SPD was also polling around 15% and Scholz was ridiculed for his stoic optimism. Then the CDU made one mistake too many, resulting in a surprising win for the Social Democrats. The chancellor continues to point to that victory, but this time around, there is no sign of his bucking the trend.

His party is trying to woo voters with a classic social democratic platform of stable pensions, financial help for families and the middle class, and affordable climate change policies. The SPD has also pledged to revive the ailing economy by relaxing the country’s debt brake, which forbids increasing state deficits. On foreign policy, the chancellor has pledged to "prudence," in particular, in terms of weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Olaf Scholz had only been in office for three months when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Ever since, Germany has faced the tightrope walk of supporting Kyiv militarily without being drawn into the war itself. Scholz has been accused of indecisiveness, but he calls it “prudence.”

The resulting energy crisis, spiraling inflation, the economic slump, the European asylum dispute and the unprecedented postwar electoral success of the far right — a post-war German government has probably never had to deal with so many problems at once.

Most unpopular government in postwar history

His coalition, named the "traffic light" coalition, after the three parties' colors — SPD (red), neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) (yellow) and environmentalist Greens — was an alliance full of political contradictions. It was a self-proclaimed "progressive coalition" formed after the 2021 general election, but the differences between party programs could not be bridged for long. After months of public bickering and backstabbing, it had become the most unpopular German government since the end of World War II.

But Scholz seemed unperturbed by that and, indeed, by his own personal slump in public popularity. He has tended neither to comment on approval ratings nor to mold his policies around them — while continually stressing that anything is possible.

Smooth and efficient rise to power

Scholz’s 2021 win was the pinnacle of a decadeslong political career, which began when he joined the party in 1975 as a schoolboy. Over the years, he underwent a remarkable transformation. As deputy chairman of the SPD youth organization in the 1980s, he was known as a radical socialist calling for "the capitalist economy to be overcome." But as a specialist attorney for labor law with his own law firm in Hamburg, he learned a lot about business and independent entrepreneurship.

Scholz was soon seen as belonging to the more conservative wing of the SPD. He held political office as Hamburg's interior minister and as labor minister in the first "grand coalition" of the SPD and CDU/CSU under ChancellorAngela Merkel. Then he was governing mayor of the city-state of Hamburg. "Whoever orders leadership from me, gets it," he famously said when he took office there in 2011. In 2018, he moved back to Berlin as finance minister in another grand coalition under Merkel.

'Scholzomat': The robotic technocrat

Another formative period was when he served as SPD secretary general alongside Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 2002 to 2004. During this time the Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit coined a phrase that stuck: "Scholzomat" — combining "Scholz" and "Automat" to reflect Scholz's dispassionate manner and technocratic language, like a machine whose job it is to unflinchingly sell government policy, showing no emotion.

Scholz has never been unable to shake off that image of the boring and fun-free bureaucrat. He saw himself as a fact-oriented pragmatist who gets on with things quietly and efficiently.

That strategy worked well for him during his time as finance minister, when he quickly provided billions in aid to companies affected by the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and communicated pithily.

The taciturn chancellor

However, he has failed to realize that the job of chancellor requires far more communication. Scholz has remained silent during the biggest of crises, rarely finding the right words, seeming arrogant and failing to win the hearts and minds of the people.

His low popularity ratings made some in the SPD wonder if they wouldn’t be better heading into the 2025 elections with Defense Minister Boris Pistorius as their lead candidate. He has been Germany’s most popular politician for months now. But Scholz refused to bow out.

This article was originally written in German. It was first published on November 15, 2024, and later updated and republished.

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