I have an appointment with the people next Sunday, ”said Olaf Scholz at the beginning of the week in Soltau.

And it looked like it might be a pleasant encounter for him.

Scholz is on tour.

While the “Schulz train” derailed early four years ago, things have been getting better and better at Scholz recently.

But a train can also derail when entering the station.

The Scholz-Express had rushed through blooming survey landscapes in the past few weeks, now it is driving slightly braked towards election Sunday.

Some voters have been concerned with setting the course to the left since the Union's station loudspeakers have been making corresponding announcements.

His opponents ask whether the finance minister is politically involved in financial scandals.

Little reliable was found in committees of inquiry.

Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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A search in the Ministry of Finance also provided diffuse news.

Campaign stains from a CDU public prosecutor, as the SPD claims.

Even the Greens say that there are deficits in the fight against money laundering and that Scholz shares responsibility.

In any case, the incident meant that the Scholz campaign had to make intermediate stops, for example last Monday in front of the Bundestag finance committee.

The Union is trying "to move forward with flimsy arguments," said the SPD candidate for chancellor on Tuesday on the sidelines of an event in Soltau.

The citizens would know how to classify it.

Scholz had to expect attacks. It was mainly due to the presumed futility of his candidacy that he was hardly attacked during the first twelve months after his nomination. That is how long the SPD persisted between 14 and 17 percent. A worn out, staffed party with a considerable decline in membership. It was questionable whether Scholz would even be invited if the big players, i.e. the Greens and the Union, competed in television duels. Now he can say: “I have an appointment with the people next Sunday” without any laughter. The sentence was the evasive answer to the question of whether he or Saskia Esken had already arranged to meet with the left to explore a coalition.

Scholz's candidacy has picked up speed since the end of July, first passing the Greens, then the Union. The election campaign at the end of August reflected this: Kevin Kühnert gave the cheer at an SPD event: “Our chancellor candidate is coming soon,” he called to the Berlin audience, “the power bar behind the red bar.” Applause and flag waving. But before that there is still music. “You're simply the best!” Sang the opening act singer. That had to mean Scholz. Almost 1,000 people were standing on August-Bebel-Platz - when was the last time the Social Democrats had so much audience?

For a long time, the Scholz anthem had not wanted to sing along boldly.

As chairman of the Young Socialists, in 2017 he organized a “NoGroKo” campaign against the grand coalition that Scholz and Andrea Nahles built.

And two years ago Kühnert mobilized tens of thousands of lawyers against Scholz in the fight for party leadership.

It should rather be the left backbencher Saskia Esken and the political pensioner Norbert Walter-Borjans.

The SPD let “lobbyists and false advisors lead it into the neoliberal pampas”, etched Walter-Borjans, referring to the finance minister, who at the time was still on the debt brake.

Scholz was in the way of the supposedly “progressive” left-wing course of the SPD.

Kühnert demanded that the new path of the SPD be "credibly lined with faces".