Election campaign
Green politician: Scholz is known as an asshole in the SPD
Updated on December 27, 2024Reading time: 2 min.
The Green Party’s Paula Piechotta caused irritation with a harsh insult to the Chancellor and was criticized by some Social Democrats. An apology follows in the evening.
The Green Party housekeeper Paula Piechotta received criticism with a harsh insult from Chancellor Olaf Scholz and ultimately apologized. In a podcast, the Leipzig member of the Bundestag complained that Scholz was isolated in European politics and then said in this context: “I would say that the SPD has known Olaf Scholz for a very long time. Everyone in the SPD knows that Olaf Scholz is an asshole.”
The statement was heard in an episode of the “Ostgrün” podcast published on December 23rd, which Piechotta recorded with her party colleague and Leipzig local politician Martin Meißner. Several media outlets had previously reported.
Piechotta said: “Macron invites Selenskyj and Trump to Notre Dame – and Scholz isn’t even there. That’s dramatic.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President-elect Donald Trump attended the reopening ceremony of the cathedral in Paris in early December. Before that, a three-way meeting took place with French President Emmanuel Macron. Piechotta called the SPD chancellor a below-average head of government who had caused a disproportionate amount of damage in Europe.
The video for the podcast was made private on the YouTube platform in the evening, but there are still numerous corresponding excerpts with the controversial statement on the X platform.
Several SPD politicians criticized the Greens on X for their choice of words. Parliamentary group vice-president Detlef Müller wrote, for example, “You simply don’t call the Chancellor an ‘Arxxxloch’. Basics of education and decency.”
Piechotta apologized in the evening on that Olaf Scholz can be described as such,” she wrote.
A few hours earlier, she had already announced that she wanted to remove the relevant passage from the podcast, but insisted that she had not insulted Scholz. She only reproduced internal SPD statements.
Shortly before Christmas, all parties represented in the Bundestag except the AfD and BSW agreed on a so-called fairness agreement for the election campaign. “We debate with respect for each other and refrain from personal denigration or attacks on the personal or professional environment of politicians,” it says.