2023-07-14 17:35:42
For his big summer press conference, Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not show up on Friday in the best conditions. A year and a half after coming to power, the three-party coalition of the head of the German government only won over 40% of voters. It has suffered greatly from months of dissension, particularly between environmentalist and liberal allies, over the plan to ban fossil boilers. To top it off, the Constitutional Court postponed the final vote, sanctioning the chaotic management of the majority, which did not leave parliamentarians enough time to study the text.
The Chancellor’s Social Democratic Party ranks only third in the polls (17%-19%), behind the conservative CDU-CSU (26%-28%) and even the far-right AfD party (19 %-20%).
A method to review
The Chancellor took the opportunity to defend his record for long minutes: aid to Ukraine, improved minimum wages and social benefits, the historic scale of the transformation on the path to carbon neutrality and the return to the budgetary golden rule. “Last fall many were afraid of being cold, that countless factories were going to close, that we were going to have an economic crisis for a decade. It is already a success to be here today and to have forgotten that we had a problem”, recalled Olaf Scholz. Indeed, Germany countered with billions – and successfully – the crisis resulting from the Russian aggression in Ukraine.
And yet, the far right is reaching record levels in public opinion. The Chancellor draws conclusions from this. “We must make a policy with which citizens have reason to look with confidence to the future”, insists the Social Democrat. As a guideline for his majority, he slips “we should have the ambition that each measure is capable of finding a majority in a referendum”a form not provided for by the German institutions.
Countering the AfD
Olaf Scholz took the opportunity to launch an appeal for tolerance, and recall the consensual essence of German parliamentary democracy. “We need to understand as a government, but also as a society, that balancing positions, seeking compromise, without losing sight of the goal, is a reasonable way to do politics. » By doing so, Olaf Scholz assures us, the AfD “will not do better” during the legislative elections of 2025 than during the previous election (10.3%). The Chancellor promises less cacophony at the start of the school year. Without however saying whether he intends to intervene further upstream to nip the controversies in the bud.
The exercise in front of more than a hundred German and foreign journalists was an opportunity to respond to attacks on migration policy and insecurity. The Chancellor was in favor of a police presence in swimming pools after the multiplication of incidents at the start of the summer. In response to the conservatives and the far right, who accuse him of laxity in the face of irregular immigration, the Chancellor repeated his ambition to reconcile deportations to the borders and the promotion of labor immigration, which is the subject of a recent law, in order to compensate for the aging of the population. Experts estimate that the country must reach a net migration of 400,000 people per year to compensate for retirements.
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