Scholz Calls for Cooperation from Conservative Opposition Until February Elections

With an appeal to the conservative opposition to cooperate with the minority government he leads, to pass several pending bills before the early elections, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a passionate speech to the Bundestag on Wednesday, aware that his administration's days are numbered. «Let us collaborate for the good of the country until the new elections,» Scholz said in a statement primarily directed at the parliamentary group of the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU).

«My proposal, my appeal to this house is: let us act together on what we agree on,» stated the Social Democratic politician, referring specifically to a tax reform favourable to taxpayers, an initiative to boost economic growth, an increase in family allowances per child, and a law to guarantee the independence of the Constitutional Court, but also the review of pensions to ensure their payment to future generations, aid to Ukraine, or the financing of the modernization of the Bundeswehr, the federal army.

Scholz defended before the chamber the breakup of the coalition with the expulsion of the Liberal Party (FDP) and its president, the dismissed Finance Minister Christian Lindner. «That decision was correct and inevitable,» affirmed the Federal Chancellor, accusing Lindner of inflexibility in managing the national treasury. «It cannot and should not be that support for Ukraine leads to cuts in healthcare and care for people with disabilities,» argued Scholz, for whom his former minister's program would have meant financial cuts to pensions, healthcare, and social issues.

Posing dilemmas in the state budgets, pretending to choose between financing this or that is a temporary program for populists and extremists and does nothing but harm and divide Germany,« warned the Social Democratic leader. Scholz said he spoke last Sunday with the President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, with whom he claimed to have had a »good conversation.« He added that »from my point of view, good transatlantic cooperation between Germany and the United States has been fundamental to our country's success for decades« and admitted he hopes this continues in the future. »It doesn't matter who governs here and there,« he concluded.

The conservative response was not very hopeful. The parliamentary leader of the CDU/CSU and the strongest candidate to become the next Federal Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, made it clear that his formation will not support any initiative of the Executive in the Bundestag until Scholz presents his vote of confidence, announced for December 16, which will pave the way for early elections at the end of February. «We are not the substitute players of your fractured government,» Merz stated bluntly, accusing the Social Democrat of not having presented that vote of confidence this Wednesday to accelerate the transition and accusing him of «pretending» to have a parliamentary majority lost with the departure of the liberals, although the Greens remain in his cabinet.

«What you have said here, Mr Chancellor, is not of this world. Obviously, you live in your own cosmos, in your own world,» highlighted the conservative leader, accusing Scholz of having lost touch with reality, while calling the way he justified the expulsion of the FDP and Lindner from his government «simply unworthy» a week ago. Regarding the request to collaborate to pass several laws before the end of the legislature, Merz proposed to the Social Democrats and Greens to negotiate those legislative initiatives with the conservatives before presenting them in the Bundestag. Only with a prior agreement should they reach the chamber.

Merz thus wants to prevent the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) from gaining free prominence by becoming the unexpected crutch on which the SPD and the Greens rely to push their legislative proposals forward. In this sense, the president of the Christian Democrats made it clear once again that the Union parties maintain the firewall around the far-right populists, with whom his formation wants no relationship. It doesn't matter how many deputies they get after the next elections, Merz affirmed, referring to electoral polls that place the AfD as the second national force after the conservatives.

Meanwhile, voices are growing among the Social Democrats calling for Scholz to step down from leading the election campaign in favour of his Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, the most popular German politician among the population. Prominent SPD leaders in the federal states of Lower Saxony, Hesse, Saxony-Anhalt, and Hamburg have spoken in favour of this change of candidate for the chancellery. «I am surprised that in the SPD we are throwing ourselves into the abyss like lemmings,» said Markus Schreiber, a Social Democratic deputy in the Hamburg city-state parliament, given Scholz's evident unpopularity and the polls that give his party the worst results in the Republic's history in the upcoming elections.

«There is a danger that we will land in fourth place, behind the Union, AfD, and the Greens. That would be a catastrophe for the country. I don't think the SPD will get more than 15% of the votes with Olaf Scholz,» declared Schreiber, supported by many other regional politicians alarmed by the electoral prospects demanding an internal debate in the SPD about the current Chancellor's candidacy and his replacement by Pistorius. He does «very good work and therefore has great recognition, among the troops, but also the country. He would be the best offer for voters because he connects better with people,» said Rüdiger Erben, SPD parliamentary organization secretary in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, one among the growing group of critical Social Democrats.