Olaf Scholz when asked whether he would be the SPD candidate for chancellor: “Yes it is”

Despite the debates within the party, Chancellor Olaf Scholz assumes that he will lead the SPD as candidate for chancellor in the federal election. When asked whether he would be his party’s top candidate, he said in an interview with RTL and N-TV: “I think that the discussions that are going on now are completely okay. But we want to win together. Yes it is.”

When asked what makes him so sure that the SPD, with him as candidate for chancellor, can close the gap to the CDU in the polls, Scholz replied: “We have shared experience that this can be achieved.” In the last federal election campaign, the SPD was also far behind the CDU/CSU at times, but narrowly won the election after catching up. Scholz does not want to trust current surveys in which respondents are in favor of Boris Pistorius as the SPD candidate for chancellor. “The citizens decide in the election and not the people in the back rooms who come up with idiosyncratic strategies – as we have heard from the FDP about what they have planned.”

There are still 100 days until the federal election. However, Scholz must recognize that the debate among the Social Democrats about the right candidate for chancellor has fully flared up. On Tuesday, other SPD politicians spoke up to make their preference for incumbent Scholz or Defense Minister Pistorius public. In doing so, they ignored appeals from the party leadership to maintain unity and avoid a personnel debate so close to the election. Scholz has now commented on this for the first time.

The Chancellor has lost support in the influential NRW SPD, the largest state association. The two chairmen of the NRW state group in the Bundestag, Wiebke Esdar and Dirk Wiese, said in a statement that he had worse chances in the new election than Pistorius. “The current reputation of Chancellor Olaf Scholz is strongly linked to the traffic light coalition”he quoted “Mirror” from the text. Be in the constituencies “a lot of encouragement for Boris Pistorius” listen.

Previously, the spokesman for the Ruhr SPD in the Bundestag, Markus Töns, said star said that there is one “Restart” need, and this would be “easier with Boris Pistorius than with Olaf Scholz”. The SPD parliamentary group’s interior expert, Sebastian Fiedler, also spoke out in favor of Pistorius. He could “I couldn’t imagine a better top political manager”said Fiedler “Focus”.

Meanwhile, Minister Pistorius pledged his loyalty to Scholz – but avoided a clear rejection of his own ambitions to run for chancellor. “The only thing I can definitely rule out is that I will become pope”said Pistorius on Monday evening at an event organized by the Bayern media group in Passau. But he is one “deeply loyal person”said the minister. That’s why he won’t say on his own initiative that he’s running: “I am a party soldier.”

Editorial note: Stern belongs to RTL Deutschland.