Chancellor Olaf Scholz opened the election campaign with his New Year’s address, but his speech was a disaster. This is not because he is a bad communicator, as some experts have said. It’s because he has no idea on how to move the country forward. Instead of offering new ideas or openly addressing national problems, he calls on voters to rally behind him against the populists.
The lethal assault on the Magdeburg Christmas market—an ongoing public concern—was the focus of Scholz’s speech. On December 20th a SUV was driven into a crowd of Christmas shoppers, killing five, including one child, and seriously injuring over 70 others. It was the sad end point of a year marred by a succession of terror attacks in Germany.
Scholz himself had little to say about how the safety of citizens attending public events can be improved. The alleged security failures would be investigated, he said. Yet, the debate about whether the authorities failed to act on the many warnings about the perpetrator—a 50-year-old psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, who was granted refugee status in 2016—continues.
This is hardly surprising, as one of the latest revelations is that the perpetrator even hinted at his plans on the X account of Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser. In May, he commented on a post of hers:
It’s very likely that I will die this year in order to bring justice.
In contrast to the terrorist’s clear threat, Scholz could only waffle: “We mustn’t allow ourselves to be divided,” “we are not a country of opposition,” “we will not be set against each other,” “we will not respond with hate.” Germany’s problems, he said, could only be solved through more “cohesion”—a word that featured at least eight times in his speech.
Like most of Scholz’s recent record, this won’t impress anyone–not even the 16% who, as surveys suggest, may vote for him and his Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the upcoming elections on February 23rd. Indeed, Magdeburg has highlighted, yet again, how divided Germany is, and how frustrated many are with their government.
When Scholz and Faeser visited the city a few hours after the attack, they were greeted by angry citizens. Shouts of ‘Get lost’ were heard. One man called out:
How is something like this possible, Olaf?
Faeser was insulted as a ‘traitor to the people,’ according to a newspaper report.
Of course, Scholz is well aware of this public mood. That’s why his entire speech was directed against those he alleges are spreading such sentiments. In 2024, he referred to the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as “a bad mood party.” Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t stopped the voters from turning away from him and towards the AfD.
Less than eight weeks before the elections, the party is polling in second place at around 20%—and well ahead the enfeebled governing coalition parties, SPD and the Greens. The support the AfD received from tech billionaire Elon Musk—just days before the chancellor’s speech—fuelled both the government’s and the broader German elite’s fear. In an op-ed piece for Die Welt, Musk wrote that “only the AfD can save Germany.”
Alluding to Musk, Scholz said that the future of Germany won’t be decided by the owner of a social media platform. Though he didn’t mention it, there have even been debates as to whether legal action could be taken against Musk. Under Germany’s very strict anti-defamation law, well over a thousand German citizens have been charged with slander by members of the current government in the past year alone. But Musk seems too big to be silenced for now.
Scholz is of course right, that Musk won’t decide Germany’s future. Musk’s intervention has only caused such a stir because some of what he said is hard to refute. He has pointed to Germany’s dire economic situation (last year’s price-adjusted GDP is expected to have fallen by 0.1%), its overbearing bureaucracy, and the problems of uncontrolled mass migration. Yet, if the voters turn to the populists, it’s not because of Musk, but because they have come to their own conclusions about the outgoing government.
Unable to address these voters’ concerns, Scholz has resorted to insulting them:
In our discussion it sometimes seems that those who shout the loudest, get the most attention. But it is not who shouts the loudest that determines how things will continue in Germany, but the vast majority of sensible and decent people.
That’s nothing but a badly concealed way of saying that AfD voters (the insensible and indecent people) will be excluded from any meaningful decision-making about Germany’s future. It’s a repetition of the old firewall tactic of the established parties, designed to attempt to quarantine the AfD and its voters. It’s rich for a chancellor set to lose the elections to talk about the importance of “social cohesion”—all while demanding the exclusion of potentially a fifth of the electorate.
Until now, the firewall tactic has held. The AfD has been kept away from government by the established parties—including in the east German state of Thuringia, where it won a majority in September last year. But voters won’t accept being treated this way forever.
There was a time, at the height of Angela Merkel’s government, when media pundits praised elections in Germany for being boring. Everyone knew that Merkel would win, and people who wanted a sharper, louder, more controversial election were cast out to the political fringes. Clearly, Scholz and his supporters would wish for nothing more than a return to this time. His feeble and helpless call for cohesion is an appeal to rally behind the status quo. Meanwhile an increasing number of Germans feel that this status quo hasn’t served them, or the country, well. Listening to the chancellor’s insults will only confirm this view. They believe that Germany needs a change, and they are right.
