Scholz wielded a highly personalised style of leadership which his aides captured in the ominous acronym “OWD”: Olaf Will Das (Olaf Wants It). This was the milieu in which Scholz quickly rose to prominence in the SPD’s powerful youth wing (the Jusos) as an aggressive critic of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), atomic weapons and – not least – global capitalism. Brandt’s successor, Helmut Schmidt – a Hamburg man from the party’s Right – was constantly assailed by the party’s raucous left-wing for his Atlanticism and fiscal hawkishness. Its first post-war Chancellor Willy Brandt had just resigned following revelations that one of his closest aides was a communist spy. It was a dramatic time in the party’s history. So, who is Olaf Scholz, how did he arrive at the threshold of the Chancellery, and what sort of a leader will he be for Germany, Europe and the West?īorn in Osnabrück in Germany’s north-west, and raised in Hamburg, Scholz joined the SPD in the mid-1970s as a 17-year-old. With his Social Democratic Party (SPD) winning the election and now engaged in coalition negotiations with the Green and Liberal Parties, Scholz is almost certain to occupy Germany’s top office by year’s end.
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But in September’s federal election, the Scholzomat seemed to offer precisely the kind of reassuring quality the German public craved in the absence of the retiring Angela Merkel. Ten years later, and Scholz’ style has gained not a jot of elan.
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It was a characteristic performance by the man known as the “Scholzomat” for his mechanical, austere and laconic communication style. “Today is essentially Christmas and a birthday in one for you, and yet you seem about as euphoric as an English butler at teatime,” remarked an astonished television interviewer to Olaf Scholz on the evening of his election as mayor of Hamburg in 2011.