GGermany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, says goodbye to his honeymoon as his “incomprehensible” stance on the looming crisis on Ukraine’s border fails to impress not only Russia-hawks abroad, but also more ambivalent voters at home.
Scholz, whose liberal-left “traffic light” coalition was sworn in less than two months ago, has been criticized by Kiev and other east-central European capitals for sticking to his country’s restrictive stance on arms exports to troubled regions and being slow to spell out the potential ones Sanctions that could be triggered by a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This week, Scholz also had to deal with similar criticism in Berlin. “How does it feel when allies classify Germany’s position as unreliable?” the social democratic politician was asked in an interview on German television on Wednesday evening.
When Scholz denied this, the host interrupted him by pointing out that even his ambassador in Washington had warned in a leaked memo, “Germany, we have a problem”.
While Angela Merkel rarely excelled as a speaker or rhetorician, “Scholz seems to want to surpass her in the art of disappearing,” wrote the weekly Der Spiegel, describing her successor’s performance in recent weeks as “almost invisible, inaudible.”
According to a survey by the opinion research institute Infratest Dimap published on Thursday, approval for Scholz’s SPD fell to 22 percent, overtaken by the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with 27 percent. His personal approval rating dropped 17 percentage points in the same poll.
In particular, the Chancellor’s authority has been undermined by the behavior of his last center-left predecessor in the Chancellery – and ex-boss – Gerhard Schröder, who continues to comment on world affairs as CEO of Russian energy giants Nord Stream and Rosneft.
In his television interview, Scholz was asked to make it clear that he was not taking the advice of the former chancellor-turned-lobbyist. “If I understand the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany correctly, there is only one chancellor and that’s me,” said Scholz with characteristic understatement.
Another factor that may explain the German leader’s paralysis is his addressing the German public’s often conflicting views on Russia.
The USA is traditionally described by the Germans as their most important partner – a survey from November 2021 of the Körber Foundation found renewed confidence in transatlantic relations after the election of US President Joe Biden. Less than 5% of respondents consider Russia to be an important partner.
But even the German public does not perceive Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a direct threat. The same poll, conducted prior to the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border last December, found that only 16% of Germans polled identified Russia as a threat to German values. More than 80% said the country was a minor threat or no threat at all.
In the conflict on the Ukrainian border, German hesitancy is not just a partisan compromise: In the public opinion poll conducted by Infratest Dimap, a clear majority was in favor of NATO granting Russian security assurances, and even a slim majority was against economic sanctions.
The fundamental restriction of arms exports in crisis regions is not only supported by all parties in the Bundestag – from the far-right Alternative for Germany to the left-wing Die Linke – but also by a 71 percent majority of voters.
Such tendencies are even more pronounced among the older generations and residents of the eastern regions of the country. A survey by the polling institute Forsa released this week found that 43 percent of residents in the former socialist GDR blame the US for the worsening of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, while only 32 percent blame Russia. In West Germany, 52% blamed Russia and only 17% said the problem was the US.
Balancing such differences of opinion is a particular problem for Scholz and his party: the SPD currently governs all five federal states of the former East, whose prime ministers exercise influence over the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German Bundestag.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia also comes from one of these federal states, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the SPD achieved a clean victory in the federal elections last year. The completed but unapproved infrastructure project, which has been criticized across much of Europe for making Germany dependent on Russian gas, is hugely popular with local people and backed by social democratic politicians in the region.
However, allowing Scholz to disappear will not satisfy those voters, said Liana Fix, the Körber Foundation’s Russia expert and resident fellow of the German Marshall Fund.
“What we’ve found time and time again when we’ve surveyed the German public about attitudes towards Russia is that independence is important: people don’t like the feeling of being coaxed into anything,” Fix told the Guardian.
“German voters may not want their country to supply arms, but they do want their leader to be visible in diplomatic efforts. And that should be achievable for Scholz.”
