Forty years ago a wild-haired young Hamburg leftist called Olaf Scholz was campaigning for the overthrow of western capitalism and denouncing Nato as “aggressive and imperialistic”.
Today he has become chancellor of Germany after an ideological metamorphosis and a career encompassing some of the most powerful posts in German politics.
Scholz, 63, comes into office with a more polished CV than any of his postwar predecessors: interior minister and then mayor of Hamburg, general-secretary of the Social Democrats (SPD) under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, and most notably finance minister for the past four years under Angela Merkel.
He is distinguished above all by two useful traits: he seldom makes mistakes, and when he does, they tend not to stick to him. He owes his rise to tenacious self-belief, the weakness of his rivals, a reputation for unflashy competence, and a carefully cultivated resemblance to Merkel, 67.
Polls suggest he remains something of a blank canvas for many voters. He has been nicknamed the “Scholz-o-Mat” for his supposedly robotic public appearances, including a joke about electricity generation that he repeated word-for-word at least three times on the campaign trail before the Bundestag election in September.
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His allies portray him as a thoroughly safe pair of hands, balancing an instinctive sympathy for the workers with a pragmatism born of long ministerial experience.
“Olaf Scholz is very matter of fact; there is nothing of the populist in him,” said Brigitte Zypries, an SPD politician who served alongside him in Merkel’s cabinet during the late 2000s.
“His politics is shaped by a strong feeling for social justice . . . [but] he also has a sense for what is possible under the circumstances.”
The caricature of an inscrutable technocrat and embodiment of continuity with the Merkel era, inching towards the top job by default, is deceptive.
His pitch for the chancellorship on the campaign trail was built around the idea of reunifying German society through “respect”, particularly for the left-behind and the less well-off, including a plan to raise the minimum wage from €9.60 an hour to €12.
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Aides say he was strongly influenced by reading a series of books about the rancorous social divisions in the West, such as James Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims.
He has also been influenced by the philosopher Michael Sandel’s criticisms of meritocracy, and by the work of economists who write about the downsides of globalisation and automation such as Dani Rodrik, Branko Milanovic, and Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book The Second Machine Age.
Scholz has embraced Sandel’s theory that the idea of meritocracy has a corrosive effect because it leads the rich and powerful to believe they have achieved their standing through their own superiority. Conversely, Scholz has argued, this means that workers on lower incomes feel written off and bereft of the respect they deserve, despite contributing just as much to society.
In many ways his programme for government, hammered out with the Green party and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), his coalition partners, marks an unexpectedly clean break from Merkel.
This is most obvious in its social agenda, which includes plans to loosen the criteria for immigration and acquiring German citizenship; to introduce legalised cannabis shops; to make it significantly easier for people to officially change their gender; and to bring down the voting age from 18 to 16.
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Yet there are also plans to expand public borrowing — long regarded as taboo under Merkel — and substantially harder rhetoric on Russia and China, although it remains to be seen how closely Scholz’s actions will correspond to these words.
Scholz was born in 1958 and grew up in Hamburg, a large northern port city with a strong red streak. He studied law and started his career as an advocate for workers in industrial disputes. He cut a faintly exotic figure, with the luxurious shoulder-length hair of a 17th-century English Cavalier and a political worldview that edged into hardline Marxism.
In the local Magazine for Socialist Politics and Economics he published articles deriding West Germany as the “European fortress of Big Capital”.
With time, however, he moderated his opinions and rose through the SPD. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1998 and in 2007 he joined Merkel’s cabinet as minister for labour.
Four years later he became mayor of Hamburg, a prominent post that allowed him to build a profile on the international stage in the company of world leaders such as Merkel, Barack Obama and David Cameron.
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Assessments of his time in office vary. Within the SPD he earned a name as an able and thorough administrator. Locals often admiringly cite his rescue of the city’s long-overdue and over-budget flagship concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, which had previously been one of Germany’s most infamous white elephants.
Peter Tschentscher, 55, his successor as mayor, singled out the way Scholz had slowed down Hamburg’s soaring rents, introduced free nursery places, and expanded the city’s public transport network. “Olaf Scholz has the political experience, the power of self-assertion and the ambition to modernise Germany as chancellor,” Tschentscher said.
However, Scholz’s opponents point to a number of missteps, the most notorious of which was the failure to anticipate three nights of uncontrollable rioting during the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, leaving about 500 people injured and an estimated €12 million of damage to property.
Christoph Ploss, 36, the leader of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Hamburg, is scathing of Scholz’s record in the city hall. “You mustn’t let his bourgeois demeanour deceive you: Olaf Scholz is a deeply left-wing politician who governed Hamburg unsoundly,” he said.
“As soon as things became politically uncomfortable for Olaf Scholz after the G20 riots, which he colossally underestimated he left the city, despite his previous promises, in order to become a minister in Berlin. During his time in the [city] government Hamburg took on more debt than any other German state.”
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At the start of 2018, when Merkel reluctantly cobbled together yet another “grand coalition” government with the SPD in the junior role, she made Scholz her finance minister and vice-chancellor. He turned out to be as fiscally conservative as any of his centre-right predecessors, fiercely policing the cherished “Black Zero” limit on the deficit.
At the beginning of the pandemic, however, he turned on the public spending taps, pouring €130 billion into the economy and overseeing an effective “part-time work” programme to protect jobs.
Like Rishi Sunak’s, his approval ratings rose in line with his largesse, even as his party tanked in the polls, at some points even dropping behind the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Yet he has also been haunted by allegations that weak regulatory oversight on his watch contributed to a series of financial scandals, including the downfall of Wirecard, an electronic payments company that collapsed in the biggest corporate fraud case in German history.
“Germany is a paradise for money-laundering,” according to Fabio de Masi, 41, a recently retired MP from the leftist Die Linke party who was one of Scholz’s sternest inquisitors in the Bundestag. “In an age of great upheaval and low interest rates, Mr Scholz has stuck to the debt brake [on public borrowing], which has made Germany an international laughing stock.”
Only two years ago any lingering hopes Scholz may have cherished of becoming chancellor seemed more distant than ever.
The SPD was trailing in third place in the polls, far behind Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Greens.
When the party jettisoned its leader, Andrea Nahles, Scholz ran to replace her but suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of two relatively obscure leftwingers, Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans.
Yet Scholz persisted, persuading the SPD to name him as its candidate for the chancellorship. The party, notorious for its back-stabbing factional rivalries, swung behind him, producing an election manifesto that carefully balanced its leftist and centrist impulses.
“We realised we couldn’t go on like this any longer,” one MP from the left wing of the SPD said. “We could only win if we put all this bickering behind us.”
The rejuvenation of the SPD was the most striking story of a generally volatile campaign. Its poll ratings began to tick upwards as Scholz’s opponents, Armin Laschet from the CDU and Annalena Baerbock from the Greens, made a series of costly missteps.
He quite deliberately capitalised on the perception that he was Merkel’s natural successor, appearing on the front cover of the Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine with his thumbs and index figures pinched together into the chancellor’s trademark “Merkel diamond” gesture.
Even in the heat of a strongly contested election campaign, Merkel herself could not quite dispel the impression that she respected Scholz and saw him as a kindred spirit.
Asked by The Times what qualities she prized in him, the chancellor replied: “I value that when we talk about something together and agree on it, we then both stick to it.”
Philippa Sigl-Glöckner, 31, a rising star in the SPD who previously worked under Scholz as a finance ministry official and now runs the Dezernat Zukunft (Department of the Future) think tank in Berlin, said the similarities to Merkel were extensive but not all-encompassing.
“What everybody sees in his style of politics is that it’s not one of great disruption,” she said. “That’s not the way he governs. It’s more like an evolutionary process where he wants to make sure that everybody is on board. He’s not the kind of guy who goes out with a radical message in any area.”
Sigl-Glöckner says a “seriousness about workers” is at the core of Scholz’s economic policy platform. “In Germany we have 20 to 25 per cent of people on low wages, especially in the service sector,” she said.
“That’s one of the things he worries about quite a lot: how all these people who are in a precarious position for different reasons can be united and how we will get to a more cohesive society again.”
There are differences of style, too. In public Scholz is more animated, often gesturing expansively with his hands. Where Merkel often stonewalls awkward questions, he either bats them away with well-prepared one-liners or tries to look as though he is taking them seriously.
Back in March, during one of Germany’s ill-tempered and interminable pandemic summits, a rival politician accused Scholz of “grinning condescendingly like a Smurf”.
Confronted with the comment on a television talk show a few days later, Scholz simply said: “I think it’s super. The Smurfs are small, they’re crafty, and they always win.” The likeness stuck: Scholz is now represented on the German version of Spitting Image with a puppet of a grotesquely gurning Smurf.
In private Scholz is, like Merkel, a voracious and omnivorous reader. Those who know him well say he shares his predecessor’s eclectic taste in history books, taking Brendan Simms’ Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy and a tome about the Reconquista of medieval Spain on his last summer holiday.
His other enthusiasms include jazz, Mahler, the poetry of Mario Vargas Llosa and Heinrich Heine, the novels of Thomas Mann and Günther Grass, and above all rowing, which he once said was just about the only thing capable of getting him out of bed before 7am.
“[The greatest mistake] in my private life was that it took me until I was 40 to find out that I like sport,” Scholz told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in September.
Scholz is married to Britta Ernst, a fellow SPD politician who is the regional minister for education in Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin. They have no children.
Asked which characteristics he prized most in a person, Scholz replied: “Self-reflection and self-evaluation.” There may be little time or space for either over the coming months.
