SPD board nominates Olaf Scholz as candidate for chancellor

After a tough and controversial debate, the SPD board unanimously nominated Olaf Scholz as candidate for chancellor. The DPA news agency learned this from participants during the meeting of the 33-member management committee in Berlin. The decision is to be confirmed at a party conference on January 11th. In the past two weeks, the party had publicly discussed whether the much more popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius should be substituted for Scholz, who was ailing after the failure of his traffic light government.

It was only last Thursday that Pistorius decided not to run for office, thereby clearing the way for Scholz to be nominated. In the SPD, however, the deadlock on the K question still has an impact. At the Federal Congress of the Young Socialists (Juso), the youth association of the SPD, there was sharp criticism of the party leadership over the weekend. Juso boss Philipp Türmer accused party leaders Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil of leadership failure and spoke of a “shit show”.

Esken then admitted: “No, we didn’t give a really good impression when we nominated our candidate for chancellor.” Klingbeil defended the party leadership’s actions against it. “My claim to leadership is that you listen to the party, that you hold debates, that you think in different scenarios,” he said on Deutschlandfunk.

At the same time, Klingbeil called on the party to now look ahead to the election on February 23rd. “Now everyone has a collective responsibility to flip the switch and ensure that we start the election campaign.” Esken said on ZDF with a view to Scholz: “We are now going into this fight together with him.”

After the nomination, Scholz’s candidacy for chancellor still has to be confirmed at the party conference on January 11th. This is considered a formality. However, Scholz has to be measured by his result from May 2021 – a good four months before the federal election. At that time, Scholz was confirmed with 96.2 percent of the vote.

At that time, as today, the SPD was polling between 14 and 16 percent. Only a laugh from Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet in the flood area brought about a turning point in the summer: the SPD became the strongest force with 25.7 percent.

The SPD is hoping that the challenger will make mistakes this time too. The party wants to focus the election campaign on the duel between Scholz and Union Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz. The Social Democrats accuse him of backward-looking politics and want to score points above all with Scholz’s government experience and certainty on issues.

However, when it comes to popularity ratings, the Chancellor continues to perform worse than Merz in the surveys. In the current ZDF political barometer he is in 7th place and Merz in 5th place. Pistorius is the undisputed number 1. However, the data was collected before the SPD’s decision on the K question last Thursday.

At the same time, the SPD hopes that Scholz will present himself differently in the election campaign than a head of government who is keen to balance things out. Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Minister Alexander Schweitzer (SPD) said in the ARD program “Report from Berlin” that the party now needs a combative and fighting Scholz. “The time for moderation in a difficult traffic light coalition is now over. Now we need the strong Olaf Scholz, who also shows where he wants to take the country,” emphasized Schweitzer.

After Merz and the Greens’ Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, Scholz is the third candidate for chancellor nominated by his party for the election on February 23rd. On December 7th, the AfD board wants to nominate party leader Alice Weidel as candidate for chancellor. For the first time, there are four candidates for chancellor in a federal election.