First, he failed to immediately contradict the Palestinian leader who accused Israel of “50 Holocausts” as they stood together in Berlin. Then he was heckled by discontented voters calling him a “liar” and “traitor.” And on Friday, he was summoned to testify in the case of a major tax scam that took place when he was mayor of Hamburg.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany has had better days.
“Shame in the chancellery,” screamed one headline in the tabloid Bild this week, while the news magazine Spiegel ran an exasperated column about the chancellor’s hesitant communication style: “Scholz is silent.” Germany’s chancellor, the prominent podcast The Pioneer concluded, has had “a horrific week.”
Scholz’s most recent travails come on top of a rocky start to his chancellorship. Since coming into office in December, he has struggled to find his footing as the head of Europe’s biggest democracy and as the successor of Angela Merkel, his former boss, Germany’s iconic chancellor for 16 years, a leader he likes to emulate.
Given Germany’s economic and political power in Europe, weak leadership in Berlin has implications for leadership in the European Union as well, at a time when no other country could easily step into a vacuum. In neighbouring France, the second-richest member state, President Emmanuel Macron recently lost his majority in parliament.
Accused of being too aloof and passive in his communication, Scholz, a Social Democrat, has slumped in opinion polls since the election, falling far behind his popular vice-chancellor and foreign minister, both from the Green party.
Abroad, too, his dithering has not gone unnoticed.
In February, Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s war of Ukraine with a 100-billion euro plan to rearm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.
It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — in a speech to parliament that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.
But in the nearly six months since the war of Ukraine by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Scholz has ruled out a gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is still dragging his feet on weapons deliveries to Ukraine. And according to a new report by the German Economic Institute, a Cologne-based think tank, Germany might fail — again — to meet the target of spending 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence agreed by Nato members.
“Ever since the Zeitenwende speech, it has just been a series of mishaps,” said Sudha David-Wilp, deputy director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund. “Lots has been promised but when you look at what has actually been delivered it is underwhelming and we’re coming up to the six-month anniversary of the war.”
“There is a lack of communication skills and a lot of hesitancy,” she added.
That hesitancy was on stark display on Tuesday when Scholz held a joint news conference with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Asked whether he was ready to apologise for the Palestinian ''terrorist'' attack at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich that killed 11 Israeli athletes, Abbas launched into a tirade against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Between 1947 and today Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian locations,” he said, before adding, “50 massacres, 50 Holocausts.”
A stony-faced Scholz listened but did not verbally respond. He shook Abbas’ hand when his spokesperson wrapped up the news conference immediately thereafter.
Criticisms of Scholz came swiftly.
“Such remarks cannot be allowed to stand,” said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel, the son of a Holocaust survivor, called it “a moral shame” that the comments were made on German soil. Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s conservative opposition, called Scholz’s failure to speak up “beyond belief.”
Scholz did eventually react, telling the tabloid Bild later that evening that “any relativisation of the Holocaust is insufferable and unacceptable.” But it was not until the next morning that he sent out a tweet from his own account.
Along with the challenges of rising inflation, slowing economic growth and potential gas shortages — Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom announced on Friday that gas flows to Germany would temporarily stop again at the end of the month — the accumulation of problems big and small haunting the German chancellor have weighed on his popularity.
Earlier this week, he was heckled and booed by a mix of left- and right-wing protesters, whose angry slogans drowned out his promise of tax relief on higher gas payments during a visit in an eastern German town.
Fewer than 1 in 5 Germans would now vote for Scholz’s Social Democrats, according to a poll released on Friday.
“Most Germans thought he was the man who was best prepared for the job, but it seems he wasn’t really ready,” David-Wilp said. “He hasn’t really shown the communication skills and nuances needed to be the leader of Europe’s biggest economy.”
The New York Times
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