Olaf Scholz was officially named candidate for his center-left party on Monday to run for a second term as chancellor in the early legislative elections of February 23, 2025 in Germany, AFP learned from internal party sources.
The leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) declared itself “unanimously” in its favor, the same source said, after recent dissensions within the party on the relevance of competing with the very unpopular chancellor, given the loser by the polls. Delegates will still have to validate the candidacy at a congress on January 11.
The 66-year-old chancellor, who more or less proclaimed himself a candidate after the breakdown of his coalition with the Greens and the Liberals on November 6, subsequently had to face a revolt within his social-democrat party where some spoke in favor of the very popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.
From now on, the SPD intends to unite behind Olaf Scholz, even if the bet looks risky for the oldest party in Germany, credited with only around 15% of voting intentions in the polls. The conservative opposition CDU/CSU received more than double that (33%), and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was ahead of it with 18%.
Olaf Scholz, “face” of the failure of a government marked by perpetual internal disputes, is “probably the weakest, least appropriate candidate for chancellor that the SPD has ever presented,” asserts the magazine “ Der Spiegel.
His coalition, in power since the end of 2021, fell apart after the dismissal of the liberal Finance Minister due to disagreements that had become insurmountable in terms of budgetary policy, in the midst of an industrial crisis in Europe’s largest economy.
The conservatives do not hide seeing the chancellor’s candidacy with a certain relief. The decision “is good for us”, underlined MP Mathias Middelberg, “Pistorius would have been more unpleasant for the CDU and the CSU”.
But Olaf Scholz, a veteran politician who was notably mayor of Hamburg (north) and vice-chancellor with the Finance portfolio in Angela Merkel’s last government (2005-2021), has shown several times his ability to thwart the predictions.
In 2021, he won by presenting himself as the true heir of the conservative chancellor. This time he also intends to reassure through his experience in a tormented global geopolitical context plunged into the unknown by the election of Donald Trump to the White House.
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