Olaf Scholz to stand for re-election despite being Germany’s most unpopular chancellor

Just 18 pc of Germans satisfied with leader, marking the lowest score since Helmut Kohl’s government in 1997

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said he would stand for re-election despite being the most unpopular chancellor in the country’s modern history.
A recent poll found only 16 per cent of Germans are satisfied with his fractious traffic-light coalition, which succeeded Angela Merkel’s government in 2021, and only 18 per cent are pleased with Mr Scholz personally.
It marks the lowest score since 1997, when Helmut Kohl was the German leader and lost the public’s confidence with a scandal over “secret” party bank accounts.
However, Mr Scholz maintained he would stand in the next election in 2025, believing he had a good chance at success.
“I firmly expect that the SPD and I will have such a strong mandate in 2025 that we will also lead the next government,” Mr Scholz told Tagesspiegel in a rare interview.
Mr Scholz said the bad polling numbers were a consequence of the media’s focusing on the infighting in his party and who could best work the cameras.
“Too often all that is reported is: Who is performing well? Who is misbehaving? Who looks pretty or has particularly clever words?” But he added that “we’re not making an episode of ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ – it’s about politics,” he said, referring to the German soap opera.
Mr Scholz conceded, however, that public spats between members of his coalition had become a distraction from the government’s achievements.
“[T]he government must admit that many decisions were accompanied by heated public disputes and because of all the gun smoke, it was sometimes no longer possible to see what was actually decided.”
Dubbed “boring” when he entered office, Mr Scholz was widely expected to fall short of Ms Merkel’s popularity and legacy as one of Germany’s most beloved leaders.
But a rising far-Right has made his job all the more difficult.
Growing discontent around immigration and terror attacks by asylum seekers and Russia’s war in Ukraine have contributed to a boost for the Alternative for Germany.
The far-Right party won 33.2 per cent of the vote in Thuringia in its first regional election, and also gained almost as many votes as the conservatives in Saxony.
Meanwhile, the leftist populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, won more votes than all three parties in Mr Scholz’s coalition, gathering 11.5-15.6 per cent of the vote just eight months after its founding.
The strength of these anti-Nato, anti-immigration and Russia-friendly parties will make forming ideologically coherent coalitions even harder at both state and federal levels.