Amazingly, Germany’s social democrats (SPD) have been less electorally successful even than Labour in Britain in the modern era. They have topped the poll in only three of Germany’s 19 democratic elections since 1949—namely, 1972, 1998, 2002—a third of Labour’s pretty dismal tally in the UK. At other times they edged into office because the liberals preferred to go into power with them (1969, 1976, 1980). But in all other cases the conservative CDU simply won. The SDP’s last convincing success was in 1998, a year after Blair’s first landslide.
This makes all the more extraordinary the surge of Olaf Scholz in the current German election, if it ends in him becoming SPD chancellor. But if that happens, the explanation will boil down to him, for Scholz’s success is a triumph of leadership over party. Generally respected as finance minister in Angela Merkel’s outgoing “grand coalition” of CDU and SPD, he seized the mantle of most popular leader during a protracted campaign from both Armin Laschet, Merkel’s floundering and gaffe prone CDU successor, and Annalena Baerbock, the fresh and initially popular Green leader who, in the limelight, rapidly wilted from inexperience and inability to reconcile the centrist and radical wings of the Green party.
The ascent of Scholz is grist to my mill that the only thing that really matters in electoral politics is leadership. It’s not that parties, policies and organisation are insignificant; rather that they only operate in the context of successful leadership and cannot substitute for it. I set out this argument in a Prospect article four years ago—and it has stood the test of time so well that I have turned the theme into a book, It’s the Leader, Stupid, which is published in the autumn and includes my writing on successful electoral leaders since Lincoln and Gladstone, including Prospect profiles this year of Joe Biden, Narendra Modi and Boris Johnson.
To date, the only two German social democrats to have won an election since the Second World War are Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schroeder, the SPD’s two most charismatic leaders of the era. Scholz obviously isn’t in the Brand/Schroeder mould of scintillating charisma. “He’s the closest thing to a political automaton,” one ex-colleague said to me, “and I’m only slightly exaggerating.” So how is he apparently doing it?
In It’s the Leader, Stupid, I distinguish between the qualities which make for successful political leadership and pure telegenic charisma. Sometimes (Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau) winners do come from charisma central casting. But charisma is not purely physical. In politics, evident competence and a compelling personal and national narrative are also elements, as no-one demonstrates better than Merkel herself. In the competence stakes, Scholz is the Merkel continuity candidate. By contrast Trudeau, fighting for his life in the Canadian election also taking place next week, is suffering from a narrative of incompetence in an election he called unnecessarily early, although his personal ratings are still higher than those of his Tory opponent and it looks close.
The complicating factor in Canada, making the outcome exceptionally hard to predict, is that the leader of Canada’s third party, the Sikh politician Sandeep Singh who does charisma by dynamism and the common touch, is the most popular of the three leaders vying for power. But he leads a party which has never got close to winning a Canadian election, so he has the double task of winning a popularity contest while establishing for the New Democratic Party a credibility which it has never previously attained. Baerbock failed to meet this challenge as leader of the German Greens while that party was briefly in the lead in the German polls, and it was a reason for her rapid eclipse.
By contrast, the SPD, which started third in the current German election, is the country’s oldest democratic party, boasting three considerable chancellors since the war (Brandt’s successor Helmut Schmidt, from Hamburg like Scholz, was the third). For all its vicissitudes, including a recent spell of left-wing Corbyn-style leadership before Scholz became “chancellor candidate,” the SPD never lost the aura of a governing party, not least because it is a governing party, not only in many of Germany’s 16 federal states but also in Berlin, where Scholz is vice chancellor in the outgoing coalition.
So my theory needs some modification. “It’s the leader, stupid”—only up to a point. Parties have charisma as well as their leaders, albeit a charisma which comes from past leaders whose shadow persists. If Scholz pulls it off, he owes Schroeder a drink and should lay some red roses on the graves of Brandt and Schmidt—and also Otto Wels, who was the only party leader to speak out in the Reichstag against Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933, earning the nearest thing to immortality for any political party in a liberal democracy. “You can take our lives and our freedom,” he told the dictator to his face, “but you cannot take our honour.”
