Who said that German humor does not exist? The head of government of the largest economy in the EU, Olaf Scholz, wanted to anticipate the rain of jokes that have already begun to flood social networks and has encouraged jokes with his new, temporary image, unveiled this Monday through a official photo. “It looks worse than it is” assures the 65-year-old politician in his X account, formerly Twitter. A pirate-style black patch covers his right eye, and small wounds can be seen around and even on his chin. “I look forward to the memes,” jokes the German chancellor.
Scholz has reappeared this Monday in this way after suffering an accident while doing sports last Saturday. According to his team, he tripped while doing jogging, an activity that he practices daily, even though he is outside the country on international commitments. The consequences of his fall were not serious, as he himself has pointed out, but they forced him to cancel at least one event on his agenda.
After the weekend, the chancellor resumes his activity, which will not be disturbed by the consequences of the fall, his team explained. “Thank you for the good wishes,” Scholz also says on the social network, anticipating the surprise that would have caused seeing him with his eye covered in Jack Sparrow style, without prior notice, on his first official date. This Monday afternoon he is expected at the annual reception offered by the German Catholic Church in the parish of Saint Michael in the capital, invited by Bishop Karl Jüsten.
The users of the X network, who don’t need permission to make jokes, have started with the obvious: Scholz dressed as a pirate on an island paradise, including a parrot on his shoulder. In other, the parrot has the face of Angela Merkel. “We are governed by a corsair,” someone takes advantage of to launch a criticism. The Pirate Party joins the joke: “We have become chancellor!” He exclaims before the photo of Scholz. “You should see the FDP”jokes a user, referring to the junior partner of his tripartite government, the Liberals, with whom both the Social Democrats of Scholz and the Greens constantly clash within the Executive.
Scholz is heading towards the middle of his tenure with one of the worst evaluations of the ruling team on record in Germany. Since the disastrous polls of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2004 – who lost the elections in favor of Merkel the following year – such a low result has not been recorded in the periodic polls commissioned by public television ARD. Since the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the tripartite’s popularity has been falling, but in the latest edition of this survey, from just a few days ago, a new low has been reached: only 19% of respondents are very satisfied or simply satisfied with the work of the coalition, known as a semaphore because of the colors of the three parties that make it up (red for the Social Democrats, green for the ecologists and yellow for the liberals).
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The extreme right, in second position
This lack of satisfaction is transferred to the questions about the vote. If there were federal elections on Sunday – originally scheduled for 2025 – Scholz’s SPD would get a meager 16%. The data is especially worrying when compared with the results of other formations. The Christian Democrats of the CDU would increase two percentage points compared to last month and would be the most voted force with 29%. But second place would go to a far-right formation that is being monitored by internal secret services on suspicion of unconstitutionality: Alternative for Germany (AfD). If there were elections today, this party, which has already begun to gain territorial power in town halls and rural districts, would obtain 22% of the vote, its best historical result in the prestigious ARD polls, called Deutschlandtrend.
The federal elections of September 2021 left the image of a triumphant social democracy and willing to explore the tripartite formula, unknown in Germany since the fifties of the last century. The SPD won with 25.7% of the vote. The war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and the frequent and widely publicized disputes between the coalition partners have been undermining that support until this historical formation has lost almost 10 points in voting intentions. His partners, liberals and greens, have also been penalized in the polls. Today they could not reissue their alliance.
The main concerns of the Germans are currently the economy and immigration, which have displaced the war in Ukraine or climate change from the podium. At the beginning of April only 7% of those surveyed mentioned the economy; today one in four do so. The German locomotive is far from the spectacular figures of the past decade. For starters, it just narrowly came out of a technical recession, but it’s still barely growing. In the second quarter of the year, its gross domestic product remained stable (0.1%) while the rest of the large European economies are recovering at a much better pace. And if there is something that worries the average German, it is inflation, which remains stubbornly high in the country (6.1% in August), which is more affected by the energy crisis than most of its community partners.
Chancellor Scholz plays down the drama of the country’s problems and promises ambitious measures to deal with them, but his leadership is increasingly being questioned, which at times seems to be reduced to arbitrating between the two most fiercely warring factions of his government. The frequent fights between the greens and the liberals generate rivers of ink in the press and the citizens, fed up with the spectacle, look towards the conservatives and, increasingly, towards the extreme right. Although the chancellor downplays these data, the rise of far-right populism will be another of the concerns of the second half of his term.
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