Six weeks before the federal elections, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was officially appointed as the candidate for chancellor at the SPD’s special party conference in Berlin. Scholz had previously promised his party to catch up in the hot phase of the election campaign. “Winter election campaigns can have a happy ending,” he said in his speech. In Hamburg he stood for election twice in February and won. He called the developments in Austria ‘serious’.
“It’s a lot,” Scholz said. “We fight to preserve and renew the successful brand ‘Made in Germany’ – for ordinary people in our country. So let’s fight.”
The 600 delegates celebrated him standing with minutes of applause. Scholz was subsequently confirmed as the candidate for chancellor by a show of hands vote – with only a few votes against.
The difference with the Union is between 13 and 20 percentage points
The Social Democrats want to become the strongest party again in the February 23 elections, but are currently 13 to 20 percentage points behind the leading Union in the polls and are also stable behind the AfD. In the ZDF’s political barometer, the Social Democrats were overtaken by the Greens for the first time in a year on Friday and only finished in fourth place. When asked about the dream chancellor, even AfD candidate Alice Weidel does better than Scholz.
Scholz: “We will win”
After his election as chancellor, he said that, just like last time, he wanted to surprise everyone who thought they already knew how it would end. “We will win.”
Scholz had previously prepared the delegates for a targeted election campaign in a 51-minute speech. “We are actually at a crossroads in Germany,” he said. If Germany takes a wrong turn on February 23, “we will wake up in a different country.”
The Chancellor had already made it clear several times that he wanted to escalate the election campaign into a duel with Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz. ‘This is not the time for gossip. Now is not the time for age-old recipes. This is not the time for politics on the backs of ordinary people,” he shouted at the delegates. “Or in short: this is not the time for the CDU and CSU in Germany.”
“Maybe I should have sat down earlier.”
The retrospective on his three-year reign as traffic light chancellor was only briefly discussed in the speech. The chancellor admitted that he perhaps should have ended the government with the Greens and the FDP earlier. “Maybe I should have sat down earlier, not just behind the scenes, but in public.”
This time, the Chancellor largely refrained from harsh criticism of the former coalition partner FDP or the Greens and mainly worked on the Union.
Shift to the right in Austria ‘oppressive’
Scholz urgently warned against right-wing populists and attacks on democracy. He called the shift to the right in Austria “oppressive.” About FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl, Scholz said: “He is, there is no other way to put it, an extreme right-winger.”
The Austrian case shows: “It is serious.” Scholz warns that the fact that a right-winger in the neighboring country is now likely to become head of government “is something we cannot simply take note of.” In America too, forces are working to ‘destroy our democratic institutions’.
Source: Krone
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
