With just two weeks to go for the German federal elections, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has surged ahead of the two leading contenders — the centre-right Union parties consisting of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), and the centre-left Greens.
When the SPD announced last year that Olaf Scholz would be its Chancellor candidate, its ratings were far behind that of the Greens and the CDU-CSU. But in a poll last week, the SPD led at 25%, ahead of the CDU-CSU at 19% and the Greens at 17%. Most analysts credit the SPD’s late upswing to two factors — Mr. Scholz’s popularity, and a clever messaging strategy.
Mr. Scholz, a labour lawyer by training and the Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister in the outgoing CDU-CSU-SPD coalition government under Angela Merkel, is a seasoned politician who is perhaps the most experienced of the three candidates in the Chancellorship race. The Green Party’s Annalena Baerbock doesn’t have government experience while the CDU-CSU’s Armin Laschet is a regional politician who is only now making a switch to national politics. Mr. Scholz has been the most popular candidate all along, leading Mr. Laschet and Ms. Baerbock by a substantial margin even as his own party lagged behind in opinion polls.
Mr. Scholz is helped by the fact that although the SPD is centre-left, he is perceived to be from the more moderate — that is, the rightwing — faction of the SPD, making him the quintessential centrist. Just as he has made himself acceptable to rival factions of his own party, the SPD is banking on his ability to gather divergent sections of the German electorate behind him. As Finance Minister, Mr. Scholz did keep to the rightwing script of fiscal prudence. But when pandemic struck, he did not hesitate to open the purse strings, taking on additional debt of €400 billion to provide a generous rescue package that kept small and medium enterprises afloat and avoided big lay-offs.
With an established track record of being business-friendly, Mr. Scholz has smartly built his campaign around social justice. His campaign slogan is ‘respect’ — especially for those whose job profile affords very little by way of social mobility. A self-proclaimed fan of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit , Mr. Scholz has said many times that the reason nations go for choices like Donald Trump and Brexit is because the working classes feel they have no stake in the warped world of privilege propped up by a liberal ‘meritocratic’ society. He believes that rather than so-called merit, it is respect — a currency of value where a delivery executive and a CEO are entitled to the same amount — that should be society’s guiding principle.
Incremental steps
He has followed up this messaging with promises to raise the minimum wage, provide more social housing, and not give tax cuts to the wealthy. On climate change, unlike the Greens, who would like drastic measures, Mr. Scholz prefers incremental steps toward a carbon-neutral economy.
Most significantly, Mr. Scholz has tied up all these messages in a Merkel-shaped bundle, presenting himself as the one most likely to ensure continuity with the Merkel years. He even posed for magazine photographs making the rhombus symbol, a trademark Merkel gesture. It is clear that many CDU-CSU voters are unimpressed with Mr. Laschet. If a good percentage of them switch to Mr. Scholz because they believe he will stay true to their favourite leader’s mantra — incremental change built on a base of stability — that could be enough to ensure an SPD victory. However, with none of the three parties anywhere close to the halfway mark, the SPD, even if it wins the most seats, will have to cobble together a coalition. For Mr. Scholz, this has been the sole vulnerability where the CDU-CSU has been able to score some points. It has warned voters that Mr. Scholz may form a government with the hard-left Die Linke.
In most democracies, it is common to hear talk of anti-incumbency around poll time. In Germany, however, the ruling party finds itself in a bizarre situation where it could lose polls because the rival party has produced a convincing clone of the incumbent who, for the first time in the history of post-war Germany, is not standing for election.
