Farewell speech by Olaf Scholz: A lot of feeling, no self -criticism

Olaf Scholz gets special applause right at the beginning for the end. When he was reminded of the moment before his speech at the SPD party conference in a video when he threw finance Minister Christian Lindner from the government, the delegates cheer. It is a moment of a feeling of social democratic self-assertion, which has almost cult in the SPD, just like the no Gerhard Schröder on the Iraq war, for which it was still cheered many years later.

Olaf Scholz will later relativize this aversion to Lindner’s Liberale in his speech and say that it was still good to use the chance to modernize the country in a traffic light coalition without the Union. It is difficult to make the government break appear as its most significant decision. This clarification is the prelude to a farewell speech by the chosen Chancellor, in which he will say a lot about what he liked, but not a word about what went wrong. Let alone for their own mistakes.

For 50 years, Scholz is a member of the SPD this year – a fact that the delegates still mentioned a little softer in dealing with the fourth social democratic Chancellor, but that with the shortest term. The vast majority in the hall seem to be determined that day to celebrate the ex-chancellor. Many delegates left the frustration at their party leader Lars Klingbeil the day before.

Scholz was never a favorite of the party, and party days were rarely edified for him. His re-election, as General Secretary of the party chairman Gerhard Schröder, remains almost traumatic at the Bochum party congress at the height of the Agenda debates. Scholz received only 52 percent.

Even later, when he could be voted in the party leadership, he achieved mixed results that were worse the better, the better he cut in the real life in Hamburg in real life, where he was temporarily the only Prime Minister of the SPD who ruled with an absolute majority. This discrepancy between public reputation and internal party was preserved. The SPD did not want him to be chairman, but took him as a candidate for chancellor because no one else would have had a realistic chance. And then he won completely surprisingly.

Gratitude is a word that often falls in this speech. Scholz says he does not want to speak of his chancellery. “It’s about our chancellery.” And then he thanks everyone, from former chairpersons such as Andrea Nahles and Martin Schulz, to party and parliamentary management during his chancellorship to the ministers, “with whom I had the honor to work”. That is well received, but should perhaps relieve him in advance of the obligation to take the defeat alone.

The Russian war in Ukraine takes up a lot of space in this speech. Scholz defends the turn of the times, the deliveries of arms and also the billions for the Bundeswehr as “necessary consequences”. Germany has become “far from a distance” the largest supporter of Ukraine in Europe – “and will remain”. He does not say more about the party-internal debates, which had recently caused unrest in Russia politics.

“We moved a lot together,” says Scholz. He calls the right to self -determination, citizenship law, the accelerated approval procedures. The migration figures are now also sitting because of the measures of the traffic light coalition. Precisely because the traffic lights have failed at the dispute over 15 billion euros, it fulfills it with special satisfaction that hundreds of billions of billions for defense and infrastructure are now loose – a law that he had signed as managing chancellor because it was still passed by the old Bundestag. He can delight on such a detail.

At some point in this speech, it might have been indicated for Olaf Scholz to say something about the last election campaign, to be able to bring about a catch-up hunt like 2021, perhaps even to the loss of trust, which he suffered from the population as a chancellor and who let the SPD crash into a 16 percent result. But he says nothing about that.

Instead, he reports to his party to continue talking about the cohesion of society, about his leitmotif of respect for people without a doctorate or professional career. That should be a kind of legacy.

The SPD must also be there for the employee who packs packages on Amazon and at some point retire. For the cashier and the nurse. Scholz, who obviously does not intend to give up his MP mandate in the Bundestag, the only SPD direct mandate in all of East Germany, this Olaf Scholz announces that it would continue to participate in the programmatic discussions, “in the given order”, as he formulates in a approach from humility.

And he still makes a promise that the delegates, according to the experience with the newspaper-Leitartikler Helmut Schmidt and Putin friend Gerhard Schröder, take note of with amused consent: “I plan to be a former chancellor that the SPD is always happy about.”