Friedrich Merz will become Chancellor – or will he?

Dear readers, there must be so much time: I wish you a happy new year.

If you are reading this column, you have already read Olaf Scholz’s last New Year’s speech. Some may regret this, others are happy. I would like to confront you with the thought that it may not be this Chancellor’s last New Year’s address.

Well, you are faced with an extremely tricky task right at the beginning of the year. What kind of nonsense is Fried saying? The federal election has been decided, the polls are clear, Friedrich Merz will be chancellor, Scholz will be replaced, over, over and so on. Okay, it could be that the coalition negotiations will take more than ten months after February 23rd because Merz wants to govern with the Greens, but Markus Söder doesn’t. Then Scholz would still be in office on New Year’s Day 2026, only in an executive capacity, but with a television address.

But I don’t mean all of that.

I mean the case that Olaf Scholz actually wins the election. Even if you now suspect that my residual alcohol level was too high from New Year’s Eve, I would like to ask you to note that I have at least once seriously considered this possibility.

It’s like this: All journalists expect Merz to win. But it was similar in 2021, when for months no one believed that Olaf Scholz had even the slightest chance of becoming chancellor. Almost nobody. Because there were a very few who wrote it down differently, to be precise: one.

That was my colleague Peter Dausend. On May 12, 2021, when the SPD was at 14 percent in the ZDF “Politbarometer”, the Union at 25 and the Greens at 26, he clearly noted on page one of “Zeit”: “Olaf Scholz could become Chancellor.” Crazy, right? Back then it was as if the fanatical Saarlander Dausend had predicted that the third division team 1. FC Saarbrücken would be playing in the Champions League in two years. Simply impossible.

A special aura has surrounded his colleague since he was proven right. Fame and honor were bestowed on him, and his editor-in-chief certainly gave him a big raise. Some people are said to have sent him lottery tickets to fill out. And whenever the Chancellor predicts his election victory for 2025 to unbelieving journalists and mocks: “You were already wrong in 2021,” someone in between shouts: “Not the Dausend!” That eats away at the competition’s self-confidence, at least mine.

The idea that Scholz will win again is the nightmare of many journalists – not necessarily out of political antipathy, but because they suspect how the Chancellor would savor this triumph. His already strong self-confidence would then be so great that Saarland would fit in three times.

A colleague recently said that if he were re-elected, he would rather cross the Atlantic in a rowing boat as a reporter on Scholz’s first trip to the USA than spend eight hours on a plane with the boastful chancellor.

Nevertheless, I wanted to talk about Olaf Scholz’s election victory here and now, see above. If this actually happens and Scholz shouts jubilantly on election night that everyone has been wrong again, then I hope that you will shout at the television: “Not Peace!”