The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will be nominated as the candidate to lead his Social Democratic party (SPD) into the February general election after his more popular defence minister, Boris Pistorius, pulled out of the race.
After weeks of calls for a change at the top of the ticket, Pistorius released a video on Thursday in which he said he was “not available” to stand as the SPD flag-bearer in the snap election triggered after Scholz sacked his finance minister, Christian Lindner, imploding the three-year-old ruling coalition.
“This is my sovereign, my personal and entirely own decision,” Pistorius said in the three-minute clip posted on the SPD’s WhatsApp channel. “I did not launch this debate, I didn’t want it and I didn’t put myself forward for anything.”
Observers noted that the 64-year-old had also not ruled himself out until reportedly pressed by Scholz and other leading Social Democrats. The decision comes after several MPs, members of the rank-and-file, and the former party leader Sigmar Gabriel had all given their support to Pistorius, dealing a crushing blow to Scholz.
The move by Pistorius, who regularly tops polls of Germany’s best-liked politicians, brings a clear but messy end to the rumblings in the country’s oldest political party in making Scholz the apparent default choice.
“We want to go into the next election battle with Olaf Scholz,” the SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil said in advance of a leadership meeting on Monday where the 34-member board will anoint their nominee. On 30 November, the party will hold an “election victory conference” in Berlin, where Scholz is expected to lay out his campaign plans, before members gather for a party congress on 11 January to approve the candidate.
Der Spiegel magazine called Scholz, 66, now “the perhaps weakest candidate of all-time” in postwar Germany, and said the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), Friedrich Merz, now seemed to be a foregone conclusion as the next chancellor. The CDU, with about 32% support in the most recent opinion polls, has double that of the SPD on 16% going into the 23 February election.
Weekly Die Zeit concluded that “the wrong one stepped aside” given Scholz’s dismal popularity ratings, suspecting widespread resignation in the party to imminent defeat. It said the SPD leadership had opted for the “safe choice” of continuing with Scholz rather than the unprecedented move of removing a sitting chancellor from the ballot against his will.
It noted that Scholz’s cautious stance on weapons shipments to Ukraine versus Pistorius’s more hawkish views made the chancellor more palatable to the party’s left wing, who fear losing pacifist voters to the resurgent far-right Alternative für Deutschland and the new conservative populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).
Scholz leads a lame-duck government at a fraught time for the EU’s top economic power. As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House promising swingeing tariffs that could hit German industry, Germany’s economic health is being sapped by weak growth and a crisis in its all-important car industry.
Scholz’s many detractors say he lacked the leadership qualities to rein in his quarrelling three-way coalition with the liberal Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens, as well as the communication skills to sell its policy goals to voters struggling with high inflation and an uncertain economic outlook.
Scholz fired Lindner after a months-long row over how to fill a multibillion-euro hole in the national budget, after the finance minister called for strict adherence to the country’s debt brake. The other two governing parties argued that extraordinary circumstances facing the country, not least the cost of arms shipments to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion, required immediate exceptions to the budgetary rules to allow more investment. The FDP in turn withdrew from the coalition, depriving it of a parliamentary majority.
Adding to the chorus of criticism on Friday was Angela Merkel, under whom Scholz served as vice-chancellor and finance minister. She commented on Scholz’s angry televised speech after he fired Lindner and announced he was pursuing new elections, saying it was “not exactly an object lesson in dignity”, in an interview with Der Spiegel ahead of the release of her memoir Freedom.
“My first thought was: men!” she said of the unseemly end of the current government. “Taking things personally – that’s something you should avoid at all costs in politics.”
Merkel said she had taken “tough blows” during her 16 years in power but had learned to keep her feelings in check in public. “You feel a lot of emotions, but it’s better if you shout at the wall in your office than at the German public,” she said.
