A blend of Starmer and Sunak, with a touch of Blair: Meet Olaf Scholz, the man likely to succeed Merkel

Politics is full of surprises, and not the least of them is the strange rebirth of social democracy in Germany. As the largest economy in Europe faces a general election on Sunday 26 September, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) seems set to be the shock winner – albeit on only around 25 per cent of the vote. For the first time since the demise of Gerhard Schroeder in 2005, Germany will have a person of the left, Olaf Scholz, at the helm, though inevitably governing in some sort of coalition.

It is quite a turn-up for the books, given that the SPD, like so much of the European left, has seemed to be in terminal decline for so long. With their voter base eroded by industrial change and nationalistic populism, centre-left and progressive parties the world over have been written out of the political script. The victory of Joe Biden and the more muted re-emergence of the German left give their fraternal partners globally a little ground for hope for a break in the clouds.

It makes a change. In recent years, given the SPD’s feeble electoral performance, it has only managed to hold on to power and influence at all by the grace of Angela Merkel, who found the various alternatives too distasteful and thus had to prop up the old rival party. It was almost an act of charity, and a bit of a humiliation for such a historic movement. Now, though, it is the SPD which is in the ascendant (or at least doing less badly), with the Christian Democrats, now bereft in the face of the imminent departure of “mutti”.

The switchback holds some lessons for the SPD’s sister party in Britain, Labour, which has followed a roughly parallel pattern of rise (1960s and 1970s), fall (1980s), rise again (late 1990s) and long, dispiriting decline (2010s). With Keir Starmer’s party only just registering a lead over the Tories for the first time this year, there may be some lessons for Labour to learn.

The main reason for the SPD’s relative strength isn’t hard to spot. The bald, pugnacious-looking SPD chancellor-candidate (not always the party leader), Scholz has struck something of a chord with German voters. In British terms, he is something of an amalgam of Starmer and Rishi Sunak, with maybe a touch of Blair. Let’s unbundle that a little.

First, like Starmer (and Blair for that matter), Scholz is a lawyer by training who went into politics, and has never had what lazy critics call “a real job”. (Unlike his brothers Jens, an anaesthesiologist and academic, and Ingo, a tech entrepreneur). He graduated from high school in 1977, picked up a degree in law from university in Hamburg, specialised in labour law and wound up in the civil service. A complete SPD insider, he was a student politician and got into the Bundestag in 1998 at the age of 40, and married Britta Ernst, another SPD politician.

He was general secretary of his party during the SPD’s last tenure in office (with the Greens from 1998 to 2005), and has held office during the SPDs on/off grand coalitions with the Christian Democrats ever since. By 2018 he was finance minister, a job that has made his reputation. His lack of any other experience seems to have done him no harm, beyond leaving him with a slightly dull Starmer-like image, the sort of guy who you could imagine as a partner in a firm of corporate solicitors. In any case, he too can hold his own in an argument.

But there is that ordinariness about him, which has earned him the nickname Scholzomat, tilting at his supposedly robotic persona.

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But then again, this has been turned by Scholz into an asset. Pragmatic, straight-talking, outward-looking, maybe a little sceptical about romantic Europeanism (unlike his Christian Democrat rival Armin Laschet), Scholz is a true son of Hamburg, a small echo of the great Helmut Schmidt, who presided over the SPD’s glory years in power 40 years ago. Scholz self-consciously wants to be the heir to Merkel, a sensible centrist who takes decisions rationally on the evidence and chooses the best option with little ideological bias. Germans quite like that, and value intelligence and competence in their leaders (Boris Johnson would do badly over there; Starmer less so).

Those who think the poor showing of the Christian Democrats in the current campaign betokens a rejection of Merkel, and especially her immigration policy that welcomed one million Syrians into Germany, misunderstand what is going on. There has been no swing to the far-right Afd Alternative for Germany, and Euroscepticism is a fringe activity.

Merkel’s legacy is not about to be trashed: It is her prospective successor, the jokey and colourful Rhinelander Laschet who is the problem for the present ruling party. Laschet is prone to clowning (literally in some local festivals) and gaffes, and while Scholz has made his share of mistakes, he appears the safer pair of hands. So keen is he to stress this part of his appeal that he has adopted the “Merkel rhombus”, the shape the chancellor makes with her hands when she isn’t making a point. It has been noticed.

Such is Scholz’s appeal that his personal approval ratings are sky-high compared to his lacklustre competitors. If Germany had a presidential system of government, he’d win by a landslide. He has been lucky with his enemies. A few months ago the Greens’ leader and candidate for chancellor, Annalena Baerbock, described as “tough, talented and very ambitious”, seemed ready to pull off a Green revolution. Unlike in much of Europe, the German Greens have evolved from being a cranky one-issue pressure group into a genuinely responsible party of government – so much so that in some places such as Bavaria they have supplanted the SPD as the main progressive/left party. But a plagiarism scandal got the better of her and she lost ground as a result (Laschet has also been embarrassed by similar claims against his authorship of a book in 2009).

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Often the job of finance minister can kill a political career, because that is the figure often identified with tough, often unpopular choices. But for Scholz, like Sunak, the pandemic presented an opportunity for some heroic fiscal fireworks – vast support programmes that helped keep Germany’s powerful economy afloat and people in jobs. As with Sunak, Scholz even outshone his boss. Merkel, though mostly respected for steering Germany through some nasty storms, including banking collapses, euro crises, and the migration crisis, did not cover herself in glory during the pandemic. As in Britain there was a scandal over the procurement of face masks, and another one involving the corporate collapse of Wirecard, though in that case Scholz, as finance minister, had some difficult questions to answer.

Scholz does, though, have policies for the future, and a philosophy, albeit a borrowed one. British Labour might care to note Scholz’s plain messaging, and he is pointing Germany leftwards after decades of centre-right dominance. He wants to push the minimum wage up to 12 euros an hour. He wants to restrain rents (in a country where that remains a more usual choice than in Britain), and targets a 400,000-a-year new homes programme. A carbon-neutral economy is an obvious way of scooping the left-Green vote. The rich will pay for some of these reforms via a 1 per cent wealth tax. In style and to a degree in substance he is the “continuity candidate” for Merkel fans (not all of them natural conservatives), and comes from the right of his party, but there’s a red lining to his coat.

He has also found a way of synthesising the old left’s passion about equality of outcomes with the centrist emphasis on equality of opportunity. Taking much of his reasoning from the public philosopher and American academic Michael Sandel, Scholz talks about “respect” for those who work hard and try to get on, but who have not been greatly favoured even by new opportunities, especially in education.

Not everyone can get a university degree – but do they not have a right to respect, to some dignity, a recognition of their merit? According to Scholz, “merit in society must not be limited to top earners”. It’s a fine blend of populism and leftism; “popular social democracy” (though he doesn’t call it that), unafraid of itself and conscious of the tendencies to elitism in its own ranks: “Among certain professional classes, there is a meritocratic exuberance that has led people to believe their success is completely self-made. As a result, those who actually keep the show on the road don’t get the respect they deserve. That has to change”.

He’s not the only one to notice how the pandemic has changed perceptions of care home cleaners and lorry drivers. Scholz thinks the left forgot about equality too readily, and that Trump and Brexit are both the consequences of the obsession with meritocracy as a cure-all that infected the left. In British terms, it is, after all, a stereotypically Thatcherite principle, purloined by Tony Blair.

Even in a completely open, equal-opportunity, classless society there will be those who do not, for whatever reason, get to the top or even the middle. What about them? We now call them the left-behind, but they’ve always been there. You could call it the limits of meritocracy, or even its fallacy. This is all explored in Sandel’s new book, The Tyranny of Merit, and Scholz has adopted it.

In truth it isn’t that new. Ed Miliband, when Labour leader, was entranced by Sandel’s ideas, and invited him to deliver a lecture in serious philosophy to the assembled delegates at the Labour conference a few years ago, a novelty for all concerned. A little further back, thoughtful old-school democratic socialists in Britain, such as Roy Hattersley, used to raise the same awkward questions in the heyday of New Labour. What about those who just don’t manage to get rich, or even have enough to live on, in the equal opportunity society? The egalitarian instinct that was submerged under the language of opportunity on the left seems now to be making itself felt once again. In Germany it seems to be winning, or at least not doing so pathetically as it did in the past. The strong German tradition of social solidarity may also at last have come to the rescue of the SPD.

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By temperament, background and political standpoint, Scholz seems the natural candidate to succeed Merkel. Germans seem to overlook his past errors, such as mismanaging the riots at the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg (he was mayor of the city for a time), and various botched episodes involving banks and tax gathering. At 63, he is only a few years younger than Merkel.

Having joined the SPD in 1975, during the Schmidt era, and been in the game ever since, he is highly experienced, but also a thinker. He is one of the few politicians on the left anywhere (Macron being an arguable exception) to have displayed much understanding of what went wrong for their brand of politics, and why.

In that respect he has a parallel with Tony Blair (though their conclusions may differ), in that he has created a light frame of philosophy that informs his policies and decisions, and one that reflects the electorate’s hopes and fears. Now he may soon have the chance to live up to his slogan – Scholz packt das an; “Scholz will sort it”. Now, how does “Starmer will sort it” sound?