“We are the party of comebacks (…) Some will marvel at the results, as they did in 2021,” he said this Saturday Olaf Scholz before hundreds of candidates and volunteers from the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The so-called Electoral Victory Conference, at the headquarters of the Willy Brandt Haus, was a landscape of red scarves with the party’s initials. Scholz’s message was “don’t believe the polls”
Polls ahead of the early elections on February 23 place the SPD at 15% of the votes, compared to 32% for the conservative bloc of Friedrich Merz or 18% of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
While Scholz remembered in Berlin the victory against the odds that brought him to power in 2021a full Merz was elected candidate in a district of North Rhine-Westphalia, in western Germany. He achieved 266 votes out of 267, after having been designated several weeks ago as a candidate for the Chancellery of the conservative bloc. Scholz’s nomination did not occur until last Monday and must be ratified at the SPD congress in January.
“We have 85 days ahead of us,” Scholz recalled, regarding the elections. On December 16 he will submit to a vote of confidence, with the intention of losing it to precipitate the dissolution of Parliament. What he seeks as chancellor and SPD candidate is to conjure discouragement, while he continues to govern as a minority with the Greens as his only allies.
Jobs in danger
The SPD is the only option that represents “the center and social justice,” according to Scholz. It is the party that will defend jobs in giants like Volkswagen and Thyssenkruppwhere tens of thousands of jobs are at risk. It is the party of the energy transition, while Merz “even talked about removing wind farms, because they are ugly,” Scholz recalled. And it is the party that “has reduced irregular migration without compromising the right to asylum,” he added, while Merz proposes to implement “hot expulsions’.
“We only have one Plan A and his name is Olaf Scholz,” the president of the SPD assured EL PERIÓDICO. Lars Klingbeil, in a separate part of the conference. In journalistic circles there is insistence on a theoretical Plan B to reactivate Defense Minister Boris Pistorius as a candidate, if the SPD continues to sink in the polls after the Christmas break. “The comeback has already begun,” according to Klingbeil.
This Saturday, the popular newspaper Bild published a poll according to which, in the event of a direct election of the chancellor, 33% of citizens would favor Scholz, compared to 35% for Merz. It is a symbolic calculation, since the German parliamentary system votes for a party list.
The collapse of the liberal ‘saboteurs’
Scholz has turned into pride the dismissal of the former Finance Minister, the liberal Christian Lindner. “It was necessary to show Mr. Lindner the door,” Scholz said to applause. The liberals had been “systematically sabotaging the coalition” for months, according to the chancellor. Your complaint is supported by a leak released after the collapse of his governmentaccording to which the liberals followed a plan called “D-Day”, a term alluding to the Allied landing in Normandy. Their plan included military terms, such as a “battlefield” to overthrow Scholz’s coalition within.
Initially the liberal FDP denied the plan. Then he acknowledged its existence. Your general secretary, Sesame Djir-Sarairesigned this week in the midst of the chaos precipitated by that D-Day that, he claims, the leadership was unaware of. The FDP was already on the tightrope of 5%, the minimum to obtain seats, and which now established itself as a traitor party.
Germany in crisis: Scholz or Merkel’s fault?
“There have been three years of government shaken by the impact of the war in Ukraine and weighed down by decades of investment stagnation,” said the Secretary General of the SPD, Matthias Miersch, in an aside with the media. The question of “responsibility” for the crisis in Germany, which will close 2024 in recession for the second consecutive year, is very present in the country’s media. The publication of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoirs has raised questions about her legacy. On the one hand, for not having stopped Vladimir Putin’s feet and on the other hand for the austerity practiced in his 16 years in power.
Merkel denies having “consented” to the Russian president even the annexation of Crimea, in 2014, out of fear that Germany would stop benefiting from the supply of cheap Russian gas. She did admit when presenting her book that she did not leave the country in “optimal conditions or tip top”, especially in terms of infrastructure or digitalization.
Scholz avoids direct criticism of Merkel. After all, he was Minister of Finance in his last great coalition. But it does promise to mobilize investments in the face of the deficits of a power “where bridges are sinking”, as happened in Dresden, or where mobile telephony and internet remain below the level of other European partners.
