German chancellor turns 64 with little to sing about

Silence swallows the chatter when Olaf Scholz enters the meeting room in Berlin’s cavernous chancellery. A haggard figure with a magnetic gaze, it’s exactly six months since Germany’s first Social Democrat chancellor since 2005 moved in here after his election triumph.

After four terms controlled by the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a space on an adjacent chancellery wall waits for an official portrait of Mr Scholz’s CDU predecessor Angela Merkel. In her four terms she grappled with a steady stream of crises – financial, euro, refugee, pandemic – but Scholz has the dubious honour of being post-war Germany’s first wartime chancellor.

Four months in, as the knock-on effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine spread, Scholz appears to have little to celebrate when next Thursday he turns 64.

His hair is long gone, as the Beatles predicted, and we don’t know how handy he is at mending a fuse or digging the weeds. And this week his Green coalition partners overtook his SPD – 21.5 to 20 per cent – with one third of those polled viewing Scholz as “faint-hearted”.

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A week after his birthday he will be in Brussels, possibly up until 2.45am, arguing with other leaders over whether the EU should offer war-torn Ukraine a membership perspective or lock the door.

This week in Berlin, Scholz agreed to a two-part meeting with the foreign press: on- and then off- the record. On the record he is a static figure, his face hangs as his mind clicks together answers like Lego blocks of recent speeches. In a faint monotone, he says Putin’s invasion marked a “Zeitenwende” – a watershed which has been met by a “dramatic” and taboo-shattering response in Berlin. On Friday a €100 billion investment fund for the German armed forces cleared its final hurdle in the Bundesrat upper house.

And, breaking with decades of foreign policy, he points out how Germany is now supplying a war party – Ukraine – with arms and other supports.

Why then, a Ukrainian journalist challenges him, are 100 refurbished Marder tanks sitting in a western German parking lot rather than facing down the Russian invasion in Ukraine’s east? Arms company Rheinmetall offered them – with 1.5 million rounds of ammunition – mid-April but has yet to receive an export permit from Berlin.

Rather than answer the Ukrainian journalist, Chancellor Scholz delivers a short lecture on everything Germany has provided to date, from ammunition to anti-tank missiles to armoured transporters. Ukrainian soldiers are being trained on new equipment that Berlin promises to supply in the second half of this year, including radar and anti-aircraft systems.

“We are doing all this in unison with our friends and allies,” said Scholz. “If you look at what the US, France or Great Britain are doing, they are doing exactly the same as us.”

Behind the scenes Berlin officials are frustrated by how contributions they see as significant by German standards are belittled, in some cases by louder allies who have contributed less. Six months into office the new Berlin administration is at the wrong end of a negative narrative that is difficult to change.

Things are different for a German chancellor in wartime, they insist. Recently Scholz reminded his SPD allies of how politicians, many with the best of intentions, sleepwalked into a world war in 1914, adding: “I’m not Kaiser Wilhelm.”

Not everyone is convinced, seeing such historical nods as a smokescreen while Scholz follows the Merkellian wait-and-see tactical game plan.

Scholz insists he ignores polls but if he looked he would see ambivalence: German public support for supplying Ukraine with military equipment dropped nine points from April to 46 per cent in May, while those opposed to arms supplies jumped from one third to 44 per cent.

All the while Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador to Berlin, Andrij Melnik, accuses the Scholz administration – almost on a daily basis – of discussing arms rather than delivering them.

A list of heavy weaponry supplied by the Ukrainian defence ministry, marked with national flags, shows Germany represented in four sections, but with just one delivery to date of seven self-propelled anti-tank guns. The rest is earmarked as “to be delivered” in late 2022.

According to the “Ukraine Support Tracker” of military, humanitarian and financial aid – compiled by Kiel’s IfW economic institute – EU support for Ukraine from February to May 2022 comes in at €16 billion, around a third of the US contribution in the same period.

German assistance in absolute terms puts it in Europe’s fifth place on the IfW table – behind the UK and Poland – but ahead of France and Italy. Relative to economic strength, however, Germany is in 14th place.

Kiel researchers suggest a midfield Berlin is punching below its weight for political but also practical reasons: two decades of defence cuts means Germany’s military has little working equipment to spare or share. As a result, IfW researcher Christoph Trebesch says Germany has a particularly long gap between announcement and delivery.

The shadow of history plays a role too: Berlin is anxious to provide real assistance without becoming a party to war; nor does it want to deliver any equipment – such as German Leopard tanks – that could be captured and used for Russian war propaganda.

Back in the chancellery, when we go off-the-record, another Olaf Scholz appears: his face grows animated, the slits of his eyes widen and light up, his hands gesticulate. Leaning back, then forward, he is decisive and direct, to the point of bluntness, on the political and economic cost of Putin’s war on Russia, and Turkey’s threatened veto on Nato accession hopes of Finland and Sweden.

It’s clear he wants to leave us with a clear on-the-record message: without minimising Ukraine’s suffering in any way, the crisis triggered by Vladimir Putin may yet prove to be a historical opportunity for Germany to break its Russian energy addiction and become a real post-carbon industrial economy.

“Germany is reducing its dependence on Russian gas...more than many other technologically-advanced industrial country,” he said. “With investment in new CO2-neutral industry, we are creating the basis for good economic development in years ahead.”

Apart from that, though, Scholz happily lets our hour pass with answers that are far from the penultimate verse of When I’m 64: “Indicate precisely what you mean to say.” For a few days more at least, Olaf Scholz is still 63.