Merkel Era Ends As Scholz Faces Daunting Covid And Climate Change Challenges

Germany has officially elected Olaf Scholz as the country’s chancellor, bringing the curtain down on Angela Merkel’s 16year rule. The soft-spoken 63-year-old Scholz, who was Germany’s finance minister from 2018, succeeded the retiring 67-year-old after she deftly lead the country and the European Union through a series of major crises over the past 16 years.

- Erik Kirschbaum

Mr Scholz, who was once also a popular mayor of Hamburg, is a humble and dour straight-talking northern German who unexpectedly won September’s election for his long-suffering Social Democrats (SDP) by unabashedly copying Ms Merkel’s calm and collected style of consensus building – becoming the kind of stoic, even slightly dull, leader who Germans tend to prefer as a sharp contrast to the turbulence in the first half of the last century.

He is only the fourth SPD chancellor after Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schroder in a country where the conservatives have utterly dominated the country’s post-war politics by holding power for 51 of the last 71 years. Ms Merkel, the first post-war leader to voluntarily leave office, watched Mr Scholz being sworn into office from the spectator’s gallery of the Reichstag as she was no longer a member of parliament.

Her success-spoiled conservative party suffered its worst-post war result in September, plunging 8.8 percentage points to 24.1 per cent behind the SPD (25.7 per cent), and is now embroiled in a bitter leadership struggle with an uncertain outcome. Joining his SPD are the pro-environment Greens and the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) as junior coalition partners in the first-ever such “Ampelkoalition”, or “traffic light coalition”, at the federal level. The nickname that is popularly used in Germany comes from their party colours: red (SPD), green (Greens) and yellow (FDP).