How German Chancellor Olaf Scholz became so unpopular

In September, 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 time in office.

Two months later, following the collapse of his center-left three-way coalition, he may be beginning to ponder that question. So far, the leadership of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is publicly demonstrating support for Scholz as their top candidate for the upcoming election on February 23, 2025. But with Scholz's low popularity ratings and the election campaign already heating up, calls in the party came up to replace Scholz with 64-year-old Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who has been Germany's most popular politician in polls for months.

If, as predicted, the center-right bloc of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) takes over the chancellorship, Scholz will have had the shortest term of office of any of the four chancellors of the SPD in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.

But Scholz is determined to win. In view of the current polls, which show the SPD only half as strong as the CDU/CSU, this is will be a real challenge.

Having said that, Scholz has never lacked self-confidence. Even in seemingly hopeless situations, he has always fervently believed he had everything under control. Critics have accused him of having a distorted perception of reality in such moments.

"You obviously live in your own cosmos, in your own world," said CDU leader Friedrich Merz in response to Scholz's upbeat speech in parliament a week after his coalition collapsed. "You have not understood what is happening out there in the country at the moment."

Most unpopular government in postwar history

Scholz's political career has been marked by ups and downs. His chancellorship faced several major challenges following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Germany's tightrope walk of supporting Ukraine militarily without being drawn into the war itself.

The resulting energy crisis, inflation, the economic slump, the European asylum dispute and the unprecedented postwar electoral success of the far right — the federal government has had to deal with an extraordinary multitude of problems under Scholz.

His coalition government, 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.

Scholz, however, seems unfazed, pointing to the 2021 election campaign when he managed to buck the trend and win. Three months before the general election, victory for the SPD seemed impossible. The party was far behind in the polls, but Scholz was undeterred, saying again and again: "I will become the chancellor."

His stoic optimism earned him much ridicule at the time, but one month before the vote, CDU candidate Armin Laschet made one mistake too many, and the SPD emerged the surprise winners garnering 25.7% of the vote, 1% ahead of the conservatives.

'Scholzomat': The robotic technocrat

For Scholz, the 2021 win was the pinnacle of his decadeslong political career. He joined the SPD as a schoolboy in 1975. Before he entered the Bundestag in 1998, he ran his own law firm in Hamburg, held office as Hamburg's senator of the interior, as labor minister in the first "grand coalition" of the SPD and CDU/CSU under Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Then he was governing mayor of the city-state of Hamburg for many years. "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.

From 2002 to 2004, Scholz served as SPD secretary general alongside Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. It was during this time that 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.

In the years since, Scholz has been unable to shake off the image of the boring and fun-free bureaucrat. He sees himself as a fact-oriented pragmatist who, rather than putting on a show, only says as much as is absolutely necessary, while working 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.

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. But even though many supporters have called on him to change his style — to talk more, to become more approachable and even show some emotion — Scholz has refused to adapt, simply letting criticism roll off his back.

Even though the SPD executive is currently demonstratively in favor of Scholz as the top candidate, he has not yet been nominated. The official nomination of a top candidate is scheduled to happen at a party conference in January.

This article was originally written in German. It was first published on November 15, 2024, and then updated when Boris Pistorius made clear that he is not competing with Scholz for the chancellorship.

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