German Defense Minister Backs Scholz As SPD Candidate for 2025 Vote
(Bloomberg) -- German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said he won’t compete to lead the Social Democratic Party into an early federal election in February and threw his support behind Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s reelection bid.
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The SPD’s national leadership plans to formally nominate Scholz as candidate for chancellor on Monday, according to a party spokesperson.
“That is my sovereign and entirely personal decision,” Pistorius said in a social-media video earlier Thursday, lauding the incumbent chancellor as the right person to helm Europe’s largest economy through times of growing uncertainty and tensions.
“In Olaf Scholz we have an outstanding federal chancellor,” Pistorius said. “He has led a coalition of three parties, which is already difficult to lead in normal times, through perhaps the biggest crisis of recent decades. Olaf Scholz embodies common sense and prudence.”
Speculation had been growing that Scholz’s prospects of leading the SPD into the snap election would be derailed by his low approval ratings and disquiet among some party members.
Pistorius, who regularly tops nationwide popularity polls, was seen by many in the party as a better choice than Scholz.
Scholz insisted this week that he would run as the SPD candidate, brushing aside criticism by some of the party’s lawmakers and former officials who suggested Pistorius is better placed to challenge center-right opposition leader Friedrich Merz in next year’s early election.
The CDU/CSU bloc of former Chancellor Angela Merkel has maintained a robust lead in polls in recent months.
Support for he SPD has fallen to about 16% in national polls, compared with almost 26% the party took in the last parliamentary election three years ago. That puts the Social Democrats third behind Merz’s bloc and the far-right Alternative for Germany. The Greens were at 10% in an INSA poll published last weekend.
Scholz lost his majority in the German parliament two weeks ago after he dismissing Finance Minister Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democrats, in a dispute over debt-financed government spending.
Germany’s economy will hardly grow next year as underlying problems add to cyclical weakness, Scholz’s independent panel of experts said last week. Gross domestic product is set to increase by just 0.4% in 2025, the Council of Economic Experts forecast in a twice-yearly report. That compares with the government’s 1.1% growth outlook a month ago.
“Everyone should now rally behind the chancellor,” Anke Rehlinger, SPD state premier of Saarland, told RTL television. “He has taken responsibility for Germany, he has released the brake on progress.”
(Updates with SPD state premier comment in the final paragraph.)
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