Olaf Scholz is running as candidate for chancellor – decision final

Olaf Scholz was confirmed by the SPD as its candidate for chancellor for the federal election on February 23rd at its party conference in Berlin. When voting by show of hands, there were only a few dissenting votes against the incumbent Chancellor.

Scholz was nominated as candidate for chancellor by the party executive at the end of November only after a tough and controversial debate. The party had previously discussed publicly for two weeks whether the much more popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius should be substituted as a replacement candidate for Scholz, who was ailing after the failure of his traffic light government.

Unlike his first candidacy for chancellor in 2021, Scholz was not elected in a secret vote this time. The party leadership justifies this by saying that Scholz is now running as chancellor and not as a challenger and that in these cases it is customary to decide “by acclamation”. In 2021, 96.2 percent of delegates voted for him in a secret online vote during the corona pandemic.

In surveys, however, the Social Democrats are still well behind the CDU/CSU and their candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz. In his speech, Scholz emphasized that the election was about a fundamental decision on Germany’s direction. The country is at a “crossroads”. And if we take a wrong turn, “we’ll wake up the next morning in a different country, that shouldn’t happen.” It’s now about fair wages, affordable housing and stable pensions for “the normal people” who are the top performers in Germany, said Scholz and accused the CDU/CSU of wanting to make a policy for “the upper ten thousand”.