Germany’s new leader has some daring plans
Germany’s having Olaf, and that’s despite only 9% of Germans believing the incoming chancellor has a sense of humour.
Olaf Scholz may not be known for his quick wit and side-splitting jokes, but Germans prize sobriety and competence ahead of such frippery. Hence the man Der Spiegel magazine once dubbed “The embodiment of boredom in politics’’ has become leader of Europe’s most populous and economically powerful country. He will need the steadfast diligence and attention to detail he has shown in his quiet glide to power over the past four decades as he attempts an overhaul of the economy and society.
63 year old Scholz was born into a middle class family in Onsabruck , northern Germany, and grew up in Hamburg. As a Lutheran, he was baptised in Germany’s Evangelical Church (a federation of Protestant churches) but religion plays only a nominal role in his life although he supports respect for Germany’s Christian based culture.
He joined the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SDP) while still at school before becoming the first in his family to attend university where he studied law. There he developed a taste for hard-line Marxist politics and long hair. Both receded as he grew older but not before he agitated for “victory over the capitalist economy” and penned essays denouncing NATO as “aggressive and imperialistic”.
A lucrative decade as a lawyer tempered some of those views although he remained active in the SDP and in 1998 was elected to the Bundestag. In the same year he married Britta Ernst, also an SDP politician. They are still together and live in the Old Market Square in the centre of Potsdam near Berlin. There are no children from the marriage.
By 2002, as general secretary of the SDP, he was well known enough to acquire a nickname – ‘Der Scholz-o-Mat’ – due to his somewhat robotic media performances defending Chancellor Schroeder’s deeply unpopular labour reforms. As he told Bunte magazine, “it was certainly not an entirely false description”.
In 2007, he became Minister for Labour in Angela Merkel’s coalition government but left in 2011 to become Mayor of Hamburg. He was regarded as a very able administrator during his seven-year tenure during which he expanded the public transport system and curbed rampant rent increases, although he also ran up record public debt. There were several errors including failing to plan adequate security for the 2017 G20 summit in the city during which there was 3 nights of rioting injuring 500 people.
In 2018 he was back in Merkel’s new coalition cabinet in which again the SDP was the junior partner. Scholz was named finance minister. At first, he was fiscally conservative but when Covid-19 hit he turned on the spending taps to protect jobs. His party’s approval ratings dropped during Covid, but his personal rating soared.
As this year’s election season began, the SDP was bottom of the polls and he was thought to have no chance of becoming chancellor. In the event, with his rivals having dreadful campaigns, he steadily closed the gap. The slogan was “Scholz will sort it” and the pitch was that he is Merkel’s natural successor. For one magazine cover photo, he was pictured with his thumbs and index finger making the ‘Merkel diamond’ gesture.
His subsequent narrow victory led to two months of negotiations to put together a three-party coalition resulting in the ‘traffic light’ cabinet just announced – red for the SDP, green for the Greens, and yellow for the pro-business Free Democratic Party. The deal was announced using the title ‘dare more progress’ and the policies are indeed daring.
The end of the coal industry is ‘ideally’ to be brought forward by eight years to 2030. By the same year the coalition wants 80% of electricity to be from renewable sources with 2% of German territory hosting wind and solar farms. By that time there will be 15 million electric cars on German roads with the sale of petrol and diesel cars banned shortly after. The minimum wage is to rise to 12 Euros an hour, pensions will be no less than 48% of average salaries, and 400,000 homes are to be built each year.
To date, Germany has avoided the heat of the culture wars being fought in the USA and UK but that might change. The new government of the country which gave us the term ‘Kulturkampf’ wants to legalise the sale of recreational cannabis, lower the voting age to 16, permit clinics to advertise that they provide abortions, abolish mass holding centres for refugees, grant dual citizenship, and allow people to change gender by simply filling in a form at a registry office.
On foreign policy Scholz is something of an enigma with no clearly articulated world view. With Germany taking over the presidency of the G7 in January that will have to soon change. Scholz will be a “good European” and will head to Paris as soon as possible but may try to restrain any headlong rush by Macron towards EU fiscal union. He also has a plan to form an EU coalition of the willing to distribute refugees around the Union. He may find a lack of willingness.
The coalition parties agree they want to “raise Europe’s strategic sovereignty”, but without substantial investment in Germany’s military they can do little to further that aim in the security arena, and if the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline remains about to be switched on the EU’s energy dependence on Russia will remain. Berlin will probably continue its non-confrontational approach to Russia but also seek not to undermine NATO. An interesting detail in the coalition statement was support for Taiwan participating in international organizations – that will have gone down badly in Beijing.
The plans are big and bold. Germany needs energising after Merkel’s CDU coalition ran out of steam following 16 years in power. The country’s fourth wave of Covid is accelerating. So is inflation – expected to rise to almost 6% by years end. Scholz’s “steady as she goes” competence will be tested from day one.