After the two days that the outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel and her prospective successor Olaf Scholz spent together at the summit of the 20 most powerful industrialized and emerging countries, the question arises: How can the SPD candidate for Chancellor manage to get out of Merkel’s slipstream to kick? If Scholz is elected Chancellor, he will face an extremely difficult task, both in terms of his personality and the issues involved.
The joint appearance of the German government duo on the largest possible (and most beautiful) international stage in Rome was primarily intended to signal continuity to the G-20 colleagues – look, that’s how you can hand over government business in democracies. However, it also became apparent that some things are likely to change. Merkel and Scholz are personalities who clearly differ in style and appearance. And: in terms of content, exclusive continuity might even be counterproductive. Scholz cannot do otherwise, he has to make visible course changes.
This is almost overdue in terms of climate policy. Under Merkel, with the increasing urgency of the IPCC reports, there have been increasingly ambitious political commitments. Practical progress, however, was a snail. Merkel herself, by intervening directly in Brussels, for example, prevented ambitious ecological projects such as the traffic turnaround from gaining momentum.
It is therefore correct that Scholz promises that with him it will be more about doing than obliging. There should be no more eternal procedures, it should be built without taking any public objection into account. Scholz sounds determined to want to enforce that. If you order a tour, you get it too, is his credo. That sounds as if the SPD chancellor candidate is ready to risk a lot of trouble with the energy transition – unlike, for example, with vaccinations, where he rejects an obligation. It will be interesting to see whether he will manage this political balancing act.
Here the practitioner, there the theorist
Even if Merkel and Scholz are often described as similar – the pragmatic political style, the less pronounced propensity for drama and the all the more pronounced will to control as much as possible – there are significant differences. Merkel ruled from the experience of a peaceful revolution she had experienced herself, the imploding of an eternal social order and tremendous upheavals. It appears authentic when it derives and justifies decisions from it. That’s what made her special in the international community.
Scholz did not experience any upheavals of this kind, but got to know and read as a lawyer. The list of books he considers important across genres and countries is impressive. Scholz distilled political approaches from reading, for example when he made the arc from the rise of Trump to the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, which describes the white lower class in the USA, to his respect election campaign. The different approaches – here the practitioner, there the theorist – are particularly noticeable when Merkel and Scholz appear together. Scholz will hardly be interested in people remembering her when he appears alone. In Rome, however, he did not reveal how he wanted to overwrite the Merkel diamond.