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How Stable Is Germany's New Coalition?

The First Fractures Become Apparent in Berlin

The coalition talks were secretive and the three parties involved sought to exude unity and harmony. Now that Germany's next coalition agreement has been presented, though, fractures are becoming apparent. And surprisingly, the Greens may not be the Social Democrats' favorite child.

By Markus Becker, Markus Feldenkirchen, Matthias Gebauer, Milena Hassenkamp, Christoph Hickmann, Valerie Höhne, Christiane Hoffmann, Steffen Klusmann, Martin Knobbe, Timo Lehmann, Ralf Neukirch, Jonas Schaible, Christoph Schult, Christian Teevs, Gerald Traufetter und Severin Weiland

27.11.2021, 18.25 Uhr

Christian Lindner is a master of the cleverly chosen tactical quote. In his speeches and appearances, the head of the business-friendly and market-oriented Free Democratic Party (FDP) frequently cites authors, philosophers and other intellectuals to buttress his positions and appear cultivated – and, of course, to grandstand just a bit. Recently, Linder has even discovered a fondness for quoting Social Democrats.

It’s late on Wednesday afternoon and Linder is sitting in his corner office with a view of the German parliament building, the Reichstag – and he seems happier with himself and the world than he has been for quite some time. He has just presented the new governing coalition deal together with the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, and he is now sitting down with DER SPIEGEL to discuss just how satisfied his party is with the 177-page agreement.

"A child falls in the Wupper River in winter," Lindner holds forth, and is at risk of drowning. "A man jumps into the icy waters, swims to the child, brings the little boy back to shore and lays him in his mother’s arms."

Lindner makes a brief dramatic pause before getting to the punchline.

"The mother says to the child: And where is your hat?"

His message: Don’t look at the little things that might be missing from the agreement. Instead, embrace the huge achievement that was attained.

Who is Lindner quoting with the story? Johannes Rau, the former German president and a highly regarded Social Democrat from the Wuppertal valley. Lindner says it was Rau who originally told him the joke. Earlier, at the press conference where the three parties presented their coalition deal, he quoted Egon Bahr, the former SPD thought leader who was the architect of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik.

Lindner, it would seem, has developed a new appreciation for the center-left. Strange times indeed.

And it doesn’t stop there. The political constellation that will soon be taking over power in Germany is unprecedented at the federal level in the country. If you ignore the fact that German conservatives are divided into two parties -- the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria -- this is the first real three-party alliance to lead the federal government since 1957. It will likely produce the first female foreign minister ever in postwar Germany. And the size of the challenges facing this government are also rather novel.

[...]

Everyone thought Germany would be getting an SPD-Green government with a bit of free-market liberalism from the FDP thrown in for good measure.

What Germany appears to have received instead is an SPD-FDP alliance with a hue of Green. Almost four decades after the last SPD-FDP federal alliance collapsed.

That isn’t ideal for the stability of the incoming government. The Greens have always been the most restive of the three parties, and discomfort with its own success is deeply rooted in its political DNA.

The SPD will likely be satisfied – for a time, at least – with the fact that they have unexpectedly managed to retake the Chancellery. Large parts of the FDP will simply be happy if taxes aren’t raised. The Green Party base, meanwhile, is impatient, desperate to see rapid progress on the climate crisis. Their thinking is that of the mother in Lindner’s joke: What happened to the hat?

How Stable Will This Coalition Be?

Green voters are certain to loudly voice their displeasure as soon as they believe Habeck and Baerbock are making too many compromises and concessions. Indeed, it already started on Wednesday, when it was revealed that the FDP had been given the Transport Ministry, which many had thought would go to the Greens for its key role in climate protection measures. Immediately, displeasure began swirling in the party, particularly on the left wing.

And the next conflicts are already lying in wait. Hardly anyone – neither with the Greens or with the FDP – believe that Habeck and Lindner, both of whom have a nose for power, will be able to peaceably coexist for the next four years, despite the show they have been putting on recently. Most assume that they will frequently cross paths, if not swords.

[...]

It’s back in summer, at the end of July, and the campaign is still in full swing. It’s a sunny day on the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn, but the surroundings aren’t quite to the liking of Christian Lindner.

The lead candidate for the FDP has just finished his beachfront campaign appearance and he is now sitting in front of a fries stand drinking water out of a plastic cup. It’s not exactly his natural habitat, but there aren’t many alternatives. Lindner has just half an hour for a quick interview, and at least its relatively quiet here.

Previously, on the boardwalk, Lindner had confidently said that Armin Laschet, the CDU lead candidate, would end up as chancellor. It was a time when nobody was talking much yet about a "Traffic Light” coalition between the SPD, Greens and FDP (so named because of the colors associated with the parties, with the SPD being red and the FDP yellow). Lindner, at this time, still believes the election will most likely produce a conservative-FDP-Green alliance (known as "Jamaica" in German political parlance), and for him, the decisive question is who, in such a constellation, will end up with the Finance Ministry, the FDP or the Greens.

Lindner knows that Robert Habeck would love to become finance minister because it is a powerful portfolio and because any steps taken to confront the climate crisis will also involve a fair amount of money. But Lindner has an idea for how he might be able to wrest the Finance Ministry from the Greens. As he begins sketching out his plan there on Fehmarn island, he begins to look quite a bit more comfortable, despite his surroundings.

If the Greens really want to have the Finance Ministry, says Lindner, go right ahead – but then he plans to demand that the FDP be given the Environment Ministry. We’ll see, he says, what they have to say to that.

Lindner knows that the Greens could never allow such a thing – handing away their core issue, and to the FDP of all parties. And ultimately, say people who took part in the just-concluded Traffic Light negotiations, Lindner actually deployed this plan. As soon as the Greens indicated even the slightest interest in the Finance Ministry, Lindner sprung his trap. Habeck and Baerbock were fully aware that if the Greens didn’t end up with the Environment Ministry, they would have a party revolt on their hands. And they couldn’t take that risk.

It was, of course, a bit of a bluff. Why should the FDP saddle themselves with a portfolio that is far down the priority list for their supporters – behind tax cuts, support for mid-sized companies and the continuation of private health insurance alongside the public healthcare regime? Ultimately, though, the move worked, and Lindner is now set to become finance minister, making him the winner of the first significant power struggle – to the detriment of the Greens.

In the general election at the end of September, the FDP only ended up in fourth place, making it the weakest party in this coalition. But right at the beginning of the negotiations, the FDP laid out a number of demands from which the party refused to budge: no speed limits on the German autobahn, no weakening of the debt brake (the law requiring German governments to maintain a balanced budget), no new taxes on assets and no increases to core taxes. All those things made an appearance in the paper produced by the exploratory talks between the parties.

And the FDP proved inflexible, despite repeated attempts from the SPD and Greens throughout the four weeks of coalition negotiations to squeeze out at least a couple of small concessions on tax policy in order to leverage just a bit more financial flexibility.

[...]

The pandemic, with all its consequences, will be the first major challenge for this coalition government. The second, even bigger task is the climate crises – and on this front, all eyes are on the Greens and Habeck, the future vice chancellor who will take leadership of the economics portfolio, which, as part of the new coalition agreement, will also have responsibility for climate protection. The pressure will be on to deliver.

On paper, his chances for success aren’t so bad – even some climate activists are praising the targets agreed to in the coalition agreement: A special electricity surcharge for consumers and businesses under the German Renewable Energy Sources Act will be eliminated in 2023, buildings are to be renovated and a supply of hydrogen is to be established. The future government also wants to subsidize the construction and operation of climate-neutral manufacturing facilities. The only problem is that all these things will cost billions of euros, and where is that money supposed to come from?

Habeck is doing his best to exude confidence, but Lindner, as finance minister, will be holding the purse strings and could end up favoring Volker Wissing, the fellow FDP member who will be taking on the transport portfolio, when it comes to handing out funds.

Most Greens have accepted that Habeck had little choice but to cede the Finance Ministry to the FDP. Their hopes hadn’t been particularly high anyway. The fact that the FDP also managed to secure the Transport Ministry, however, has upset many in the Green parliamentary group.

When that group met on Wednesday morning, they demanded an explanation from their party leadership. Habeck answered evasively and referred the fact that they had finally secured the agriculture and environment ministries. But that was hardly enough for him to quell the discontent.

The nightmare of many Greens is that Transport Minister Wissing will demand billions in subsidies for cars with synthetic fuels in the coming years and the coffers will then be empty for projects the Greens want to pursue.

There is also deep frustration among the Greens that a subject as important as mobility was negotiated weakly from the perspective of many in the party. A chief Green negotiator contends that more could have been achieved in the chapter on climate-damaging subsidies. The state will continue to forego around 8 billion euros a year in revenues because diesel will continue to be subsidized via tax rebates.

The FDP had a powerful ally in the fight for the Transport Ministry: According to the negotiators, the SPD wasn’t interested in handing this key ministry over to the Greens for reasons of industrial policy. Once again, it was two parties against one.

Habeck will likely have to fight on a number of fronts. Many passages in the coalition agreement leave room for interpretation, even on such important issues as the coal phase-out. The Greens proved unable to secure a binding statement rather than the vague formulation "ideally by 2030,” because the SPD was against it. Together with the FDP, the Social Democrats have also denied the future vice chancellor the right to a "climate” veto.

The Greens had demanded that the climate minister should be able to stop all laws. Instead, this has become a "climate check” in the agreement, and the responsibility for it doesn’t lie with the future climate ministry, but rather with each individual ministry. Climate protection, it is true, is an issue for all of humanity and isn’t some niche concern for the Greens, but ultimately, missed climate targets will hurt the Greens far more than any of the other coalition parties.

The Coalition's Central Duel

There will be plenty of wrangling, and already, the central conflict is emerging: Habeck vs. Lindner, climate vs. money, Green Party vanity vs. FDP vanity. The ability or inability of these two men to work together will shape the climate of the next government and whether it is successful.

[...]

The standoff between the two will be of equals, even if they come into this from different starting positions. On the one side, you have the business-friendly FDP, a party that in recent years didn’t always seem as if it would manage to leap the 5 percent hurdle necessary for parliamentary representation. On the other, the Greens, who actually had realistic-seeming aspirations of winning the Chancellery. That expectation is helpful in explaining the current level of disappointment prevailing among the Greens. For his part, Habeck himself thinks the agreement is not only pretty good, but also pretty green, but he senses many others in the party hold a different view.

Soon after the talks began, the Green negotiators realized that the SPD would by no means be their natural ally and that it was in part fighting with the FDP against the Greens’ interests. That proved to be the case in the working group on the economy, where the FDP and the Social Democrats wanted to finally ratify the CETA free trade agreement between the EU and Canada. The Greens reject the agreement’s provision on arbitration courts. Now, the Federal Constitutional Court is to decide, meaning the conflict has been postponed.

The talks were tough, though, and the Greens soon got fed up, and frustration and fatigue grew. At one point during an internal Green Party conference call, someone could even be heard snoring.

At the same time, the Greens have chalked up some other successes that go beyond climate policy. Germany’s citizenship laws are to be reformed, "advertising” for abortions will no longer be prohibited and a moratorium has been placed on sanctions that can currently be slapped on people who receive Germany’s long-term "Hartz IV” welfare payments. However, the FDP also wanted a lot of these things and the Greens are lacking the big trophies to give their party a higher profile. Habeck himself, for example, is even wondering himself whether he gave up too quickly on the Greens’ call for a firm speed limit of 120 kilometers per hour to be imposed on all German highways.

The disappointment in the party can’t be ignored, and the negotiators were apparently already reckoning with this – at least this is suggested by an email sent out to Green Party members of the European Parliament on Wednesday morning. Michael Kellner, a high-level official in the national party and party co-head Annalena Baerbock asked them in a letter to express their "pleasure publicly” that the Greens would be allowed to nominate the next German European Commissioner. But the success they are supposed to be cheering might not even happen. If Ursula von der Leyen remains the European Commission president after the European elections in two and a half years, then there will be no German post to fill. A Green Party source in Brussels says: "The party leadership probably wants, most of all, to dampen the discontent over the fact that we didn’t get the Transport Ministry.”

The Greens’ Successes Are Primarily Declarations of Intent

Just how difficult the Greens had it in the negotiations is also visible in another chapter of the coalition agreement: foreign policy. Here, too, they had to relent on some essential points.

For years, the environmentalist party has been fighting against the official NATO target that member states should spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. Under the contract, the coalition partners do not explicitly commit themselves to that target, but they do so in a de facto way. The agreement states that Germany wants to "fulfil the obligations it has entered into with NATO.”

Under the agreement, the partners also commit themselves to German participation in nuclear deterrence, known in NATO parlance as nuclear sharing. As before, it remains possible that in a worst-case scenario, German fighter jets could be forced to drop American nuclear bombs.

One section that does have the Greens’ handwriting on it, though, is the one on EU policy. It speaks of a "federal European state,” an amendment to the EU treaties, a new European constitution and a "genuine EU foreign minister.” There’s just one hitch: How is this all going to be implemented in a deeply divided Europe?

In fact, the Greens’ successes are primarily declarations of intent. Foreign Minister-designate Baerbock is likely to repeat them like mantras over the next four years. But the most contentious point of European policy, which both the Greens and the SPD repeatedly demanded during the election campaign, doesn’t even appear in the coalition agreement: the issuance of EU bonds, with joint liability for them across the bloc.

Baerbock didn’t fare nearly as well as hoped in the national election and she was forced to cede the role of vice chancellor to Habeck. For election winner Scholz, on the other hand, the coalition negotiations were also a success, at least to a large extent.

Scholz was able to push through the minimum wage, a change to the social safety net that would allow the pension system to invest part of its money in capital markets and significant changes to the country’s long-term welfare program. In addition to the Chancellery, the SPD will also be in charge of key ministries like labor, interior and defense. There is little criticism within the SPD. The party has spent years quarreling internally, but that is barely visible now.

[...]

When Scholz Is Away, Vice Chancellor Habeck Will Represent Him

The Social Democrats are planning two online conferences and a digital party conference on Dec. 4, where the coalition agreement will be voted on. Only then will Scholz present the lineup of SPD ministers. But will he be able to keep the roster quiet for that long?

It’s likely that the pressure will be ratcheted up so high next week that some of the names will find their way into the public eye. Considerable attention is likely to be paid to the question of who with the SPD will take the helm of the Health Ministry at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Scholz would have to come up with a very good justification for not tapping Karl Lauterbach, a health policy expert in his party who has been one of the most prominent voices in the German media when it comes to addressing the pandemic.

Despite their disappointment, it is also considered very unlikely that the Green Party will reject the coalition agreement. However, only days after the presentation of the coalition agreement, the party had already become entangled in internal battles over ministerial posts. Suddenly, the old fight between the wings of the party have reemerged, one that Habeck and Baerbock had insisted was a thing of the past: the left wing versus the realos, with plenty of unsettled scores.

Things have been much quieter for the FDP, which presented its list of ministers on Wednesday. The FDP still needs to approve the agreement at a special digital party conference on Dec. 5, but there is little doubt it will go through. Then, on Dec. 8, Olaf Scholz could be elected in parliament as Germany’s next chancellor.

[...]

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nothing tops former defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenbergs choice of Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water". And only because they told him they couldn't do his favorite "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC.

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Resurrection of the SPD

The Unexpected Rise of Germany's New Chancellor, Olaf Scholz

Not all that long ago, it looked like Germany's Social Democrats had reached the end of the line. Now, Olaf Scholz is in the Chancellery. It is perhaps the most unlikely political success story in Germany's postwar history.

By Markus Feldenkirchen, Christoph Hickmann, Veit Medick und Christian Teevs

10.12.2021, 19.46 Uhr

What is displayed on the screen seems rather presumptuous, almost absurd. Outside this room in central Berlin, it would merely produce sympathetic head shaking and a bit of wry chuckling. But here, nobody is laughing. They apparently mean it seriously.

It is Jan. 13, 2020, and the meeting is taking place at the headquarters of the ASK.Berlin communications agency in the German capital, where the leadership of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has gathered. The new party heads Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans have invited senior SPD members to get together for a strategy meeting on the 2021 general election campaign, still on the distant horizon, and a presentation is up on screen. A slide comes up with the heading "Our Goal," with three dark red boxes beneath it.

"We want to achieve a successful result in the election," reads the first box.

In the second: "Successful means a better result than last time."

And in the third: "We want to lead the next federal government."

Really?

That January, surveys were indicating that support for the SPD hovered around 12 to 14 percent, and many felt the party was finished. Most commentators agreed that the Social Democrats had lost their status as a big-tent party for good when they chose Esken and Walter-Borjans as their new co-leaders in lieu of Olaf Scholz, who had become the face of the party. In Berlin, it was considered a certainty that even though Chancellor Angela Merkel was stepping down, her party, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), would remain in power. And those who disagreed thought the Greens had a shot.

Yet this week, almost two years after that presentation in January 2020, the German parliament elected Olaf Scholz as the country’s next chancellor. The vote was smooth and sedate, much like the coalition negotiations that had preceded it. Indeed, it was almost possible to forget that as recently as last summer, it seemed out of the question that the SPD would win the election. But Scholz and his party managed to produce a political sensation this year – perhaps the most unlikely victory postwar Germany has ever seen.

But how did they do it?

A closer examination of Scholz’s path to power reveals an election victory in which, although it may have been the desired end result of a carefully laid plan, luck also played a not insignificant role. It was the mixture of the SPD’s own strength and the weakness of the others. There was a masterplan and there were plenty of people who had faith in it, but for it to work, a lot of things had to come together independently of it.

And it all began with a defeat, the worst one in Olaf Scholz’s political career.

I. The Victor and the Vanquished

Nov. 30, 2019, seemed like a Saturday like any other in Berlin, with the city’s Hertha football team chalking up yet another loss, this time to Borussia Dortmund. At SPD headquarters, meanwhile, news began spreading that Olaf Scholz and his political partner Klara Geywitz had lost the intraparty vote to determine the SPD’s new leaders that afternoon – and they had lost to a couple of nobodies: Norbert Walter-Borjans and Saskia Eskens.

The result had the potential of fundamentally changing the direction of the party. It was a huge surprise – for Scholz, surely, but also for much of the party and for the public at large. But it didn’t come entirely out of nowhere.

Many Social Democrats had grown exhausted and frustrated in the preceding years. The party felt trapped within the Grand Coalition with Merkel’s CDU, stuck in a political time warp and forced into compromise after compromise by the political realities facing the country. And they tired of continually being told by party leaders that things would improve at some point as long as they kept their noses to the grindstone in the government.

By people like Olaf Scholz.

The SPD hadn’t actually wanted to be a part of Merkel’s fourth government. After the 2017 election, the party’s defeated candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, announced that he would be leading his party into the opposition. But then, coalition negotiations between the CDU, the Greens and the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) fell apart and Scholz guided the party back into a Grand Coalition with Merkel. His message at the time: The SPD could have actually won the election.

The upshot was that Schulz lost his position as party leader and Scholz became finance minister and vice chancellor. "I was too naïve at the time," he says looking back.

The party’s choice of Esken and Walter-Borjans was essentially payback for Scholz’s having led the SPD back into the Grand Coalition. The message of the Nov. 30, 2019, vote was clear: Enough! It was a vote of no confidence for Scholz and for the entire party establishment that supported him.

[...]

Politics at the highest levels is highly complex, yet it frequently only works according to archaic rules. One of those rules holds that the loser must disappear. Esken and Walter-Borjans, though, knew that they needed Scholz. If they were to force new elections by backing out of the coalition with Merkel’s conservatives, it was clear that they would be punished by the voters. So Scholz remained, as did the Grand Coalition. But under what conditions?

The SPD party convention was scheduled for that weekend, and it was clear that Esken and Walter-Borjans had to send some kind of a signal to their supporters. They couldn’t just take the stage and say that even though they had won, everything was going to stay as it was. Nuance was crucial and formulations had to be chosen with extreme care, particularly in the keynote speech. To settle on the precise wording, negotiations between the party’s two main camps were vital – and it still wasn’t clear if Scholz would resign or not.

The two camps butted heads in particular when it came to financial policy. Finance was Walter-Borjans’ specialty, and it was Scholz’s cabinet portfolio. In one instance, the two found themselves in direct conflict about the wording of the following sentence: "Investments cannot fail just because of the black zero," a reference to the balanced budget policy followed by Germany’s Finance Ministry in recent years.

Scholz rejected the formulation, arguing it would be a departure from the policies he had been pursuing in the Finance Ministry. The negotiations were adjourned, Scholz consulted with his team, and then he made a proposal: "Continuous investments" cannot be allowed "to fail due to dogmatic positions such as Schäuble’s black zero."

Mentioning Scholz’s CDU predecessor at the Finance Ministry, Wolfgang Schäuble, struck precisely the right note and the line was included in the keynote speech. Another hurdle cleared.

To that point in the government, Scholz had largely continued the policies put in place by his predecessor Schäuble. "A German finance minister is a German finance minister," Scholz said in describing his approach. Now, though, he had to become a Social Democratic finance minister.

The SPD remained in the coalition, but the party was determined to become a sharper thorn in the side of Merkel’s conservatives. The ensuing months would show whether the coalition had much of a future.

And how long would the truce hold between Scholz and the new SPD leadership team? The new leaders arranged to hold regular telephone conversations with General Secretary Klingbeil and SPD parliamentary floor leader Rolf Mützenich, every Monday and Thursday morning at 8 a.m. They also started an internal chat group called "Coordination."

It was an attempt to establish a basis of trust, a space where everything could be discussed without anything leaking to the outside world. A short time later, the SPD leadership gathered in the ASK.Berlin offices in central Berlin and set their sights on election victory. In hindsight, some people describe that meeting as a turning point: The moment when the party sought to leave its differences behind and begin working toward a common goal.

But did everyone in the room really believe it was possible?

One of them did, or at least he believed that victory wasn’t impossible: Scholz’s confidant Wolfgang Schmidt. Even shortly after Scholz lost the vote to become SPD leader, Schmidt insisted that Scholz could become the party’s chancellor candidate, and that if he did, the SPD could win parliamentary elections.

It sounded rather crazy at the time, but it wasn’t just a pipe dream. He had read a lot about the "Reagan Democrats," those working-class Americans from industrial regions who were actually part of the Democrats' core clientele but who had backed the Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Schmidt believed that kind of thing was possible in Germany, too, just vice versa.

Schmidt’s hopes were based on a statistic from surveys about past elections. According to those studies, a huge number of people had voted for the CDU, or the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, because of Angela Merkel. At some point, Schmidt figured, people would come to realize that Merkel wasn’t running again. And that, he was convinced, presented an opportunity for Scholz.

For the moment, though, not many shared his optimism.

III. The Metamorphosis

On March 8, 2020, SPD leaders were again meeting at the party’s headquarters in Berlin. It was something of a test to see if the trust that had been reestablished in the past several weeks was holding.

[...]

A few days later, though, the world had changed. It was Friday, March 13, and the preceding 48 hours had been rather surreal. Just a few weeks earlier, many in Germany had believed that a virus, no matter how contagious, wouldn’t be enough to change their lives all that much. But in early March, public life in the country was largely shut down because of the rapidly spreading coronavirus. And Finance Minister Olaf Scholz found himself sitting next to Economics Minister Peter Altmaier in front of the Berlin press corps.

The two explained how they planned to prevent economic collapse. Companies were to be given immediate tax relief and workers were to be placed on paid leave, known as "short-time work" in German political parlance. In addition, Germany's KfW development bank would take on much of the risk for corporate loans.

"That is the bazooka we are deploying to do what is necessary," Scholz said. "We’ll see down the line what other weapons we may need."

Scholz realized that political leadership was going to be vital in the new situation in which the country and the world now found itself. And he understood that the pandemic presented him with an opportunity.

The party’s left wing still suspected him of being a kind of Schäuble in SPD clothing, simply continuing the CDU’s balanced-budget policy to the detriment of other political goals. And Scholz did, in fact, want to disprove old prejudices that the Social Democrats couldn’t handle money. He had Merkel voters in his sights. The pandemic, though, now allowed him to distribute fistfuls of money without looking irresponsible – rather, as the savior of the German economy.

SPD leftists were astonished: Suddenly, the finance minister looked like one of them. And he was popular to boot.

[...]

On the morning of Aug. 10, the SPD executive committee met, and Scholz was presented as the SPD candidate for chancellor, which came as a surprise to most of those present. But nothing from the meeting initially leaked to the outside. For some participants, it was rather uncanny, accustomed as they were to the situation in prior years when sensitive information from SPD meetings would immediately be leaked to the press.

After the executive committee meeting, SPD management met. It was a much larger group and less impervious to leaks. Quickly, the news became public knowledge: Olaf Scholz was the SPD’s candidate for chancellor.

V. Slowly but Surely

The SPD had managed to do something it hadn’t done since the Gerhard Schröder era: It ran an orderly process free of strife to choose a candidate for chancellor, and early enough that they had plenty of time to prepare for the campaign. What, though, is the point if nobody was much interested in voting for the SPD?

As 2020 came to an end, Scholz was still quite popular in the country, but his party wasn’t. Poll numbers were still extremely low.

In January, SPD state governors put Health Minister Jens Spahn, a member of the CDU, on the spot by sending him a list of questions pertaining to Germany’s extremely slow vaccine rollout. Scholz joined the campaign by demanding in a cabinet meeting that Spahn answer the questions. The move angered Angela Merkel and she saw it as a rather unfriendly provocation. Which is exactly how it was intended. The campaign had slowly got rolling.

But would it be enough?

The Green Party named Annalena Baerbock as their candidate for chancellor and immediately enjoyed a spike in support in the public opinion polls. Armin Laschet, meanwhile, managed to beat out first Friedrich Merz and then Markus Söder of the CSU to become the candidate for the conservatives. He wasn’t particularly popular in the country at large, but the CDU continued to poll well. State SPD chapters started getting nervous.

In late April, the SPD party chief in Rhineland-Palatinate, Roger Lewentz, went after Lars Klingbeil in the influential German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. "We are missing the campaign launch," he complained. The attack reached the SPD general secretary when he was in a meeting, his spokesperson informing him via text message. Walter-Borjans called Lewentz and urged restraint, but the quote had already begun making the rounds – along with the impression that the SPD, even if it had a candidate, wasn’t making any progress.

Klingbeil tried to keep the party quiet. During executive committee meetings held during this phase of the campaign, he constantly reminded attendees of the goals they had agreed on: clear messaging, confident tone. We’re playing to win.

But he started receiving calls from party allies and journalists. And, in the early summer, from TV broadcasters telling him that if Scholz didn’t start moving up in the polls by August, they might have to exclude the SPD candidate from the televised debates and reserve the stage exclusively for Laschet and Baerbock.

That, of course, would have been a disaster. Televised debates are key, and candidates who are not included can essentially abandon their campaigns – for the Chancellery, at least.

And Scholz? He did what he always does. He just kept on going, taking care of the pandemic, attending crisis summits and even taking a trip to Washington. The G-7 had agreed to a minimum global corporate tax and Scholz was a major player in pushing it forward. It was actually a huge success for him. In the U.S., he had hoped to give the project a bit more substance, ideally in a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris. But she had no time – and then, her convoy even cut him off on the streets of Washington.

By then, only three months remained until the election.

VI. Harvest Time

In late June 2021, Scholz had an appointment with the photographer Axel Martens in the Finance Ministry and a couple of staff members attended as well. The Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, a weekly supplement delivered with the paper, had commissioned Martens to photograph Scholz for the magazine’s silent interview segment, in which interviewees are only allowed to respond to questions with facial expressions and gestures.

"What does conservatism mean?" Scholz stood stiffly at attention as Martens took his picture.

Then Scholz, the former mayor of Hamburg, was asked about life in the northern German city. The SPD candidate held a fish sandwich up for the camera.

"How badly will you miss Angela Merkel?" Scholz paused.

Those present remember him thinking about it for a bit before an idea began to form.

Scholz then stood in front of the camera and shaped his hands into the diamond form that had become Merkel’s trademark, the so-called Raute. Once the segment was printed, that photo quickly spread. The message was clear: I am Merkel’s true successor. Those who have voted for Merkel in previous elections should vote for me now.

It was exactly the message that Scholz’s confidant Wolfgang Schmidt had been spreading for the last year and a half, condensed down into a single gesture.

Was that the moment that reversed his campaign’s fortunes? No. But it was certainly one defining moment among many.

If there was a single turning point in this election year, then it was the scene last summer when Armin Laschet visited the region of Germany hit hard by severe flooding. As German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke earnestly into the camera, Laschet could be seen laughing hysterically in the background. Such frivolity in the face of suffering was enough for many voters: Laschet was out.

Late summer 2021 was almost magical for the SPD. Everything that had gone wrong in preceding years was suddenly working. The party stayed quiet, the candidate was perfect for the moment, everything was coming together – luck and hard work, chance and planning. It was like a movie with a rather overwrought happy ending.

Baerbock lost her nonchalance, Laschet couldn’t control his laughter and suddenly, even Olaf Scholz started looking good on his posters: black-and-white on a red background. Klingbeil’s campaign worked – a perfect mixture of a kind the party hadn’t experienced since 1998 when the Germans had had enough of Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder won the election.

Just that the SPD under Schröder pulled in 40.9 percent of the vote against the 25.7 percent won by Scholz’s SPD on Sept. 26. But it was enough to edge out the others.

The SPD had pulled almost 2 million former Merkel supporters away from the conservatives. Exactly as Schmidt had envisioned it.

But the SPD also wrested 800,000 voters away from the far-left Left Party. Because of Esken and Walter-Borjans? Because of Kühnert? Or because, for the first time in a decade and a half, there was an opportunity for a leftist majority under Social Democratic leadership? Perhaps, though, the main thing was that it suddenly no longer seemed absurd as the campaign rolled along for the SPD to insist that it intended to win the Chancellery.

Would all that have come together if Scholz had won the party vote to become SPD chair two years ago? It seems unlikely. A large chunk of the party base would have been frustrated and the left wing would have had a hard time supporting Scholz as the party’s chancellor candidate. It would have ended as things so often do with the SPD: Well thought out, but ultimately unsuccessful.

After all, not everything can be planned.