“We knew that Olaf was our best man, at this time, after this chancellor. Merkel’s public assessment continues to be very positive. But there is a great desire for change. And no one like Olaf to combine the desire for change and government experience,” he commented a few days ago to the EFE agency Lars Klinbeil, secretary general of the SPD, in an aside during the closing of the campaign.
Proposals from Olaf Scholz
In Scholz’s campaign the key is in investments, related to both economic reconstruction and the fight against the climate crisis.
His management under the Merkel government has allowed him to create confidence in many sectors that tend to identify him as a commitment to a certain degree of continuity.
Aware of Merkel’s prestige, he has flirted with it and posed before photographers making a typical gesture of the chancellor, a diamond formed with the fingers of both hands, which created outrage among conservatives.
If he reaches the Chancellery, Scholz may have conflicts with the left wing of his party, and with the leadership, which would repeat what happened during the Schröder era when many militants left the party in protest of the 2010 agenda.
Now, however, the circumstances that invite strong state action in economic reconstruction may allow Scholz to make concessions to the most purists within the group.
The SPD, the oldest party in Germany, is recovering and this occurs at a time of advance on a European scale. With the victory of Labor in Norway, the five Nordic countries – Finland, Sweden, Denmark and probably also Iceland, where they voted on Saturday – are once again ruled by this political family.
Germany, the country with the greatest demographic and political weight in Europe, has the option of joining. But Scholz will have to handle the pieces very well to become four chancellors of his party, after Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Schröder.
With information from AFP and EFE