Politically Dead Man Talking

Olaf Scholz’s moment of diplomatic lucidity about the Ukraine War leads nowhere but does reveal the misery of his leadership

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has caused a stir. Not by some kind of success, in, for instance, elections, the economy, or foreign and domestic policy. Scholz does not do that kind of thing. For a man with his ratings, crowd pleasing is not even an option.

Even though they may indeed mean Scholz’s days are numbered, as the British Telegraph surmises, the devastating defeats his Social-Democratic party and its 'traffic-light' coalition partners – the Greens and the market-liberal Free Democrats – have just suffered in regional elections in Thuringia and Saxony are just the tip of the iceberg, as polls consistently show: A whopping 77% of Germans consider their current leader “führungsschwach” (weak at, well, leading); his personal “popularity” – really, unpopularity – rating has just collapsed from a dismal 14th to a comically catastrophic 18th place. Only 23% want him to even try to run for office again, and even in his own party the majority is against the idea. 

And it’s not just him alone but his team as well: 71% of Germans think his government is doing a bad job. A difficult – and foul – 2025 budget compromise achieved in July within Scholz’s fractious coalition did not inspire hope: Only 7% of voters believed that the coalition “partners” would work together more effectively now, 10% thought things would only get worse, and 79% that they’d stay just as dire as they were. While Scholz’s government had promised that the new budget would finally jolt the ailing German economy back to life, 75% of Germans didn’t believe in that promise. And who can blame them? The German economy, hobbled by both self-imposed budgetary constraints that rule out stimulus politics and then the insane abandonment of inexpensive Russian energy, has been stagnating since 2018; as of now it has entered a “technical recession.” 

That was the mood at the end of July. By now, it’s bound to be much worse: The coalition’s rickety budget compromise is under heavy fire from, among others, Professor Hanno Kube, “one of the most respected constitutional jurists” of Germany, according to leading news magazine Der Spiegel. Kube, one should recall, has helped bring down Berlin’s shady accounting practices once before, triggering a deep and reverberating political crisis that the traffic-light accomplices have never fully overcome.

And Volkswagen, nothing less than a national symbol and by far Germany’s biggest employer in the country’s vital yet badly declining car-making sector, has ended its job guarantee and is preparing the ground for plant closures and mass layoffs in Germany for the first time in the company’s history. It’s hard to convey what a psychological blow that is. As a German, let me put it like this: Imagine losing World War I and a football world championship at the same time. Exaggeration? Guilty as charged. But not by much.

We could prolong the painful litany of Berlin’s failures at home, but the gist should be clear already: Scholz’s profile as a German leader is that of a dourly resolute, unrelenting loser. Even his much touted “Zeitenwende” ('epochal change'), that is, a policy of Russophobia and rearming, is stuck like a German truck somewhere west of Moscow in November 1941.

The Russophobia is doing alright, but then, that’s the cheap part. The rearming – not so much: The authoritative Kiel Institute for the World Economy has just found that – surprise, surprise – Russia’s arms industry is highly efficient, while Germany is lame on both feet. Take tanks, historically a bit of a German specialty, for instance: In 2004, Germany still had 2,389 of them; by 2021, 339 were left. To reach the numbers of 2004 again will take, at the current “Zeitenwende” pace, until 2066. With basic artillery – no kidding – we are talking a hundred years to get back to what was there 20 years ago. But then, how to arm yourself quickly if you also let your masters in Washington and the Green crazies in your own cabinet ruin your economy? 

And yet Scholz has managed to grab some national and international attention, namely by stating that the time has come for peace negotiations to end the Ukraine war. And, most sensationally, he has uttered the breathtakingly innovative idea – in the West at least – that Russia, one of the parties to the conflict, should actually be in the room!

It almost sounds like a bashful rediscovery of that ancient art so long forgotten in the “value-” and “rules-based” West: diplomacy. According to leak-based but not implausible reports, the German chancellor’s office is even working on a specific plan for peace – already dubbed “Minsk III” that includes Ukraine officially ceding territory to Russia. In other words, if such a plan is really in the works, it includes accepting that Ukraine has lost the war, and so has the West, very much including Germany, the largest single-country supporter of Ukraine after the US.

Scholz is, of course, denying it, but his statement would mark a clear change of course, if it were serious (about which more below). While he has refused to deliver the famous and much over-rated Taurus missiles to Kiev, this issue has overshadowed his massive and – up until now, at least – rigid commitment to the hopeless yet obstinate Western strategy of open-ended support for Ukraine without any serious attempts to negotiate with Moscow and compel Ukraine to be realistic. It would be tempting to speculate that the recent “revelations” about Ukraine’s participation in the Nord Stream terror attacks on Germany must play a role in Scholz striking a new tone, if ever so faintly. But that would be a mistake. Being offended by a brutal, highly damaging, and utterly humiliating assault on Germany – that is just not this chancellor’s style.

Instead, with federal elections only a year away, the reason for his seeming turn of almost – to apply the strikingly original geometry of Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s trampolining foreign minister – 360 degrees is embarrassingly obvious. Probably the single most important factor in Scholz’s fiasco in Thuringia and Saxony, which is about to be repeated in Brandenburg in less than two weeks. Many voters have had enough of both the costs and the risks of marching in lockstep with the US into proxy war defeat in Ukraine. In that respect, Scholz’s sudden rediscovery of diplomacy is simple, kneejerk opportunism, just like his interior minister Nancy Faeser’s sudden flipflopping on increasing border controls and making migration harder in general. 

In short: In German politics, there’s blood in the water, namely that of Scholz’s badly bruised government. No wonder the sharks are circling, and Scholz’s short – if somewhat convoluted – statement about trying to make peace by negotiations has only whetted their appetite. Predictably, there have been denunciations that, in essence, amount to the neo-McCarthyite charge of “betraying Ukraine.” For instance, Roderich Kiesewetter, a foreign policy mouthpiece of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), reliably politically extreme and intellectually basic, in February called for “taking the war to Russia” by destroying military installations, as well as ministries in Moscow. While his wildest dreams have not come true, with its Kursk kamikaze operation Kiev has recently done its worst to follow Kiesewetter’s advice. The result: a bloody, self-defeating fiasco, accelerating Ukraine’s defeat.

But Kiesewetter would not be Kiesewetter if he were capable of learning from experience. Mightily irritated by Scholz’s very shy display of reason, he is accusing the chancellor of trying to impose a “pseudo peace” on Kiev and weakening Germany’s and Europe’s security. In general, the CDU, in the opposition but doing well, is making the best of Scholz’s inconsistency by recycling deadly tired Western talking points about “doing Putin a favor” and “rewarding the aggressor.” Frankly: Blah blah blah, while Ukrainians die in droves in an already lost war.

Meanwhile, Scholz’s coalition “partner,” the Free Democrats, make the same noises as the CDU. On the other side, the right/far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), the left-conservative BSW of Sarah Wagenknecht (the two big winners of the Thuringia and Saxony elections) and the Die Linke party are much more in favor of making peace with Russia than Scholz. But they, correctly, won’t offer him any brownie points either because he’s said too little far too late.

Moreover, it is already clear that words are all that Scholz’s sally will ever amount to, for two reasons: Moscow has already signaled it cannot take it seriously, because, first, Washington is silent, and it is the US that is calling the shots in the West; and, second, no negotiations are possible before Ukraine’s Kursk incursion is over. In the old days, when Berlin was not as totally subservient to Washington as it has become under Scholz – the man with the accommodating smile who doesn’t really mind a blown-up pipeline or two – Russia’s answer may very well have been different. But selling out the remains of its “agency” – as we say in the case of Ukraine – has had consequences for Germany.

The other reason why reasonable people can only consider Scholz’s talk empty is that the German chancellor himself has, predictably, already gotten cold feet and backpedaled. Now he has added warnings that Russia must not expect “even more of Ukrainian territory” – by the way, “even more” than what exactly? – and a demand, implicit but clear, that Russia would have had to agree to a ceasefire first. Scholz must know that is a perfect non-starter, as Moscow has ruled out such a step. In effect, the chancellor has already buried his own imitation of an initiative.

It is a sad, quick, and predictable end to what now already appears as nothing more than a little loose talk emanating from a man who is both a very lame duck at home and a non-entity abroad. But, say what you will, it is in his style.

First published on RT.com, 12 September 2024