A mounting crisis of confidence confronts Olaf Scholz

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE years is a long time in politics. Through two devastating world wars and a long cold one, through fat years and lean right up to the present, Germany’s Social Democrats (SPD) have kept a prime seat at the table of power. The left-of-centre party has been a junior or senior coalition partner in every government for all but four years in the past quarter-century. Olaf Scholz, the eighth man (yes, all of them) from the SPD to serve as chancellor since 1919, leads the “traffic-light” coalition, named for its three parties’ colours, that took office after Germany’s last national election, in 2021.

But since then the SPD’s popularity, and that of Mr Scholz, has collapsed. The party came first in the 2021 election, and peaked in polls of “voting intentions” at 28%. The same polls now put it in third or even fourth place, attracting barely 15%. The downward trajectory has been so fast and steady that, barring a helping hand from fate, the SPD looks likely to be humiliated in European elections in June, then trounced in September in elections in three eastern German states, where hostility to Mr Scholz’s government seethes. Like the traditional socialist party in France, which has tumbled from national dominance to terminal irrelevance, the SPD could find itself facing extinction.