Expectations of Olaf Scholz: With all the power of the Chancellor

Olaf Scholz had not yet taken over the business of government, he was required to be strong in leadership.

That has to do with the pandemic, but also with its predecessor.

After 16 years of consensus-based governance, the traffic light coalition is bound up with the expectation that government will be governed more clearly, more quickly and more uncompromisingly.

The result of the general election already indicated this.

In Scholz, many voters believed they had found the leadership they traditionally seek in the Union.

The ingenious election promise “I can be Chancellor” was still deeply piled up.

More is expected of Scholz.

The future chancellor is favored by external circumstances.

The times of the grand coalitions are over for now.

The government and the opposition (even two of them, one fundamental, one constructive) each stand for a clearer direction.

By clarifying the parliamentary fronts, the longing for differentiation is also served.

There are alternatives again.

However, the idea that this creates the possibility that Merkel longed for in the end: to be able to “rule through” the country at last, should prove to be an illusion.

Scholz is more reminiscent of Schröder than Merkel

Not only the competition from the Bundestag and Bundesrat, which will play a bigger role than in the times of the CDU / CSU-SPD governments, speaks against this. The traffic light coalition is also nowhere near as homogeneous as it is. It must first grow into the ministries, whose management levels - with the exception of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs - will be completely replaced. Scholz also internalized the doctrine of the many government functions that he held that the Federal Republic is a state in which leadership meets institutional control and the strength of those who want to restrict it.

Scholz has already made it clear that he will not let himself be captivated by this. In doing so, he only used the image that is circulating of him anyway and is associated with the keywords pragmatism, determination and “doer”. But it went even further in a way that is only insufficiently described with the guideline competence. The modernization program that he wants to impose on the country should make full use of what politics in this country can do. The coalition agreement, too, sometimes speaks a martial language when it is intended to "get out of the way" that which opposes it.

Scholz's remark that there are no “red lines” for his government is apparently not only aimed at the pandemic. For the next four years, under his leadership, at least the continuation of a tendency that was already in place under Merkel, namely that the state, and especially the federal government, knows best what is necessary and how to do it, can be expected. For the federal states, for the municipalities and for one or the other citizen, “red lines” would definitely be crossed.

With this boldness, Scholz is much more reminiscent of Gerhard Schröder than of Merkel. At Schröder's side, Scholz has also shown that Germany can be fundamentally reformed. That was twenty years ago, but it is very present in the coalition agreement: The social-democratic repair of the Hartz reforms, which Scholz pushed through as SPD general secretary under Gerhard Schröder, is in the “citizens' money”. With Wolfgang Clement and Franz Müntefering, they put “Agenda 2010” into practice, but failed to implement it in their own party and to keep the SPD in power.

For Scholz, what is currently going on must seem like historical reparation. He replaces the politician in the Chancellery, who reaped the harvest of these reforms in her reign, but distanced herself as far as possible from the “neoliberal” course that was supposedly behind it. Merkel and the CDU were in fact initially on this programmatic track, Scholz only for those in the SPD who accused him of “ultra-pragmatism”.

In retrospect, one can only see sympathy for the attempt to establish the SPD as a stable chancellor party with a new concept of social justice through a “second Godesberg”.

Your government teams at the federal and state levels have not lost sight of this goal in the long Merkel years, despite all their resignation over the decline in popularity and internal disagreement.

The SPD failed by a hair's breadth in 2005; almost twenty years later, Scholz's perspective won by a hair's breadth.

He could now realize what he was denied back then.

The CDU and CSU shouldn't bet that with Scholz as Chancellor it will once again only be an interlude.