The first crucial point to understand about Olaf Scholz is that, contrary to the glib headlines, he is only “continuity Merkel” in style—not in substance. As I describe in my Prospect profile of him, after a decade as mayor of Hamburg and then finance minister Sholz is a bold and accomplished reformer, which is why he became the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate in the first place.
I term him a centrist moderniser. As mayor of Hamburg he ended student tuition fees, extended free childcare, delivered 10,000 homes and lengthened the school day, which pleased the left. But he also carried through a controversial deepening and widening of the river Elbe, to enable Hamburg port to continue as Germany’s principal gateway for container ships, which involved a battle with the left of his own party and the Greens because of its environmental impact. He was pro-police and tough on crime, which had its detractors in the same quarters. And he boosted public transport, including long-term plans for a new Crossrail-type metro line across the city which is only now starting construction. He didn’t just do the immediately populist “left-wing stuff” but modernised and promoted the city in all its aspects.
His style was to maximise consensus, including a coalition with the Greens in his second term as mayor. But what he didn’t do was to stick at any lowest common denominator. Nor as finance minister, where he has broken Germany’s totemic debt-brake rule for two years running and masterminded the EU-wide €750bn recovery and growth fund.
For Labour, one lesson is to demonstrate reform in action. For a party in opposition at Westminster, few of whose leading figures have a government record of any distinction, this puts a premium on mayors and leaders of devolved and local authorities. Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan have something of the Scholz approach to boast about, but no-one on the current Labour frontbench does.
The second lesson is that leadership matters fundamentally. The SPD’s rise in recent months is entirely correlated with the popularity of Scholz in comparison with the disastrous Armin Laschet, Angela Merkel’s successor as leader of the Christian Democrats, and the green as well as Green leader Annalena Baerbock. You don’t get to choose your opponents in politics, and at one level Scholz was lucky. Boris Johnson is a far tougher opponent for Keir Starmer, both as an incumbent government leader and as a street-fighting politician. But a large part of the reason why Scholz came to be seen as “continuity Merkel” is that his reputation for understated yet sure-footed competence wasn’t made up, it was true.
The third lesson is that pragmatic centrism, provided it is dynamic, almost always scores over ideology and extremism in mature western democracies. The SPD sunk to fourth place on just 11 per cent two years ago, when it chose a hard left figure as party leader over Scholz, following a serious bout of infighting in 2017/18 as to whether it should serve in Merkel’s last coalition at all. The refuseniks put purity over ideology and the voters fled. They only started coming back when Scholz became “chancellor candidate” less than a year ago and asserted a dominance over his party which convinced swing voters that he had kept the hard left at bay, despite last-minute attempts to whip up a “red scare” by the right-wing parties.
The fourth lesson is to give a strong sense of direction but not be too specific. Scholz made good play of the language of “respect” and had a small number of commitments signalling progressive reform, like a €12 minimum wage. But he didn’t put forward a shopping list manifesto. By contrast, this week’s Labour conference in Brighton, two years before a general election, has featured more specific policies with big price tags attached—including the abolition of one of the biggest revenue-raising taxes (business rates) and the potential nationalisation of virtually the whole utilities sector of the economy—than appeared in Scholz’s entire SPD manifesto.
The fifth and biggest lesson is that if you want to be treated like a government, it often helps to be in government but it is indispensable to reassure people that you can be trusted with government. Scholz exudes experience, competence and trust in equal measure. Labour needs to do the same. It hasn’t projected much of those three things since the leaderships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown more than a decade ago. Get The Insider straight to your inbox every week by signing up here
