Editor’s Notes: In this episode of The Rest Is Politics: Leading, hosts Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell sit down with former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for a wide-ranging and insightful conversation. Scholz reflects on his lengthy political career, from his early days as a left-wing activist to leading Germany during the pivotal Zeitenwende following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The discussion delves into the rise of far-right populism, the importance of “respect” in modern society, and the complexities of navigating international relations with figures like Vladimir Putin. It offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the philosophy and leadership of one of Europe’s most prominent contemporary statesmen. (February 23, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
RORY STEWART: Welcome to the Rest Is Politics: Leading, with me, Rory Stewart.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And with me, Alastair Campbell. And we are absolutely delighted to be with Olaf Scholz, who is a veteran German politician who apparently first suggested to his father when he was 12 that he would one day be Chancellor.
OLAF SCHOLZ: I don’t remember.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Well, your father does, and he’s still living.
RORY STEWART: True.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And the journey went via student politics. Several stints as a member of the Bundestag, where he still sits. Mayor of Hamburg for several years, a minister in Angela Merkel’s first coalition government back in 2007, and then by the time of her fourth government, he became Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister, and then succeeded her as Chancellor. Served for a single term — a pretty momentous term — all sorts of things, not least the Ukraine war, which we’ll talk about, and then was replaced last year by Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats. So a long, long, long career on the left of German politics, and a lot to talk about.
RORY STEWART: Thank you. And thank you so much for joining us.
OLAF SCHOLZ: Thank you for having me.
Early Life and Growing Up in Hamburg
RORY STEWART: Give us a little bit of a sense of your family and where Germany was at the moment where you were born, what happened to your siblings, and how that compared to your parents’ lives.
OLAF SCHOLZ: I was born in Osnabrück, as were my two brothers. But we don’t have any remembrance of this city because we left when I was three. My parents are from the city of Hamburg — in their passports you find Altona, now Hamburg, because this is part of a process of incorporating some cities into the city state of Hamburg in the 1930s. I grew up not in Altona, where they grew up, but in the east of the city of Hamburg, in one of the so-called suburbs. And we were very proud that we were able to buy a small house. I grew up there.
What I will never forget is that in the primary school I attended, there were five classes with 35 people in each class, more or less, and just seven of all of them — of all five classes — went to the higher education school, the Gymnasium in Germany. And this was possibly the first idea I had that there should be more justice in society.
RORY STEWART: So it was a German educational system — which we sometimes look at with envy — that drew a very clear distinction between people going to academic high schools and vocational training. But for you, from the left, you thought actually maybe this system had problems.
OLAF SCHOLZ: Yes. And when I was the Mayor, I changed it. I profited a lot from Social Democrats in Hamburg when we were for a short time an opposition party, working on having some sort of a consensus. And the outcome was that we agreed — also with the later opposition of the Conservative Party — that we would have two branches: one with the Gymnasium, and the other one where you go one year longer, but you can also get the highest degree, which was not the case before. And it was my point that this should happen so that everyone in Hamburg, if going to a regular school, would have the chance of going to university later.
Political Beginnings: The Left and the Peace Movement
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: On a left-right spectrum, how left wing were you when you were first becoming political?
OLAF SCHOLZ: I was always within the Social Democratic Party, but very much on the left.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And what did that mean back then?
OLAF SCHOLZ: Well, it was really criticizing capitalism and thinking about how we can get out of the problems caused by it. We discussed a lot of questions that were very important at that time — it was about nuclear energy and its use. We opposed it. It was about NATO — no, it was not about NATO, it was about newly established missiles. And there were a lot of other questions that were then relevant. But it was the peace movement and the starting point of people criticizing climate change, but mostly the question of using nuclear power.
RORY STEWART: And Chancellor, this is the 1980s. And of course Alastair, who is of a very similar generation to you, would have seen in the early 1980s the Labour Party in Britain being broken apart between more left-wing groups and more right-wing groups, and the split with the SDP. What is your sense of how being on the left wing of the SPD in Germany in the 1980s was different from being on the left wing of the Labour Party in Britain?
OLAF SCHOLZ: It’s very difficult to understand this from Germany. And this is also due to the fact that the party system in the United Kingdom is completely different. The parliamentary faction is much stronger than it is in the German system with all the parties. We were formed as parties running for seats in parliament, and the party is in the end taking the decisions. It is not as it is mostly in the Conservative Party here — in Labour, it was always mixed due to history.
The Schroeder Era and the “New Middle”
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Beyond that period, you became a member of the Bundestag, I think in 1998 — so we’d been in power for a year by then. And when we were dealing with Gerhard Schröder as German Chancellor and the “Neue Mitte” — the New Middle — which was seen as a parallel in some ways with New Labour. But I always sensed within the German system that there was a real kind of brake on that; there was a reluctance to go as far as Schröder maybe thought we were going. Is that fair?
OLAF SCHOLZ: At that time, I was close to the political positions of Schröder when I entered parliament. And shortly later I became the General Secretary of the party, supporting his political activities. It was a debate about how we can deal with the questions of modernity — how to create growth and modernize society — which worked quite well and which we pursued with a lot of effort at that time. So there was a debate about the “Neue Mitte” in the Social Democratic Party, but it was not at the center of the debate. It was something that some people criticized, some others supported. But in the end, it was also part of the campaign which made it successful for him to become Chancellor.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: So it’s tactical rather than strategic.
OLAF SCHOLZ: It depends who you are.
Two Germanies: Scholz and Merkel
RORY STEWART: Chancellor, we also had the privilege of interviewing Angela Merkel. And I guess her life experience was quite different to yours. You could tell a story of two different Germanies through your two different childhoods and early youth. Can you explore that a bit? Talk about what we can learn from Germany by comparing her twenties and early thirties with your twenties and early thirties.
OLAF SCHOLZ: The west of Germany had the opportunity to gain democracy after World War II, due to the British, the Americans, and France — a functioning, working democracy and a very successful economy. But it was much more complicated in the east of Germany because it was a —
RORY STEWART: — communist dictatorship, where Angela Merkel was growing up.
OLAF SCHOLZ: This is a great piece of luck that we had the chance to unify again. I think many people would not have expected that it could happen at that time. Some were hoping that there would be a time where we could reach that aim. But it happened so fast, and I’m still glad about it. And many people in the former GDR are too, because they gained democracy.
From Lawyer to Centrist Politician
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You became a lawyer, and then a lot of your work was with workers and trade unions and so forth. Am I right that your subsequent direct experience of working in East Germany — in the former East Germany — perhaps brought you to a more centrist position within the left of German politics?
OLAF SCHOLZ: All my time as a lawyer brought me to become a more centrist politician, because of the reality of life and the necessity of making pragmatic compromises with employers. I also worked for cooperatives, so I had to deal a lot with the pragmatic labor movement. And this helped me to look at the world differently. It was very important for my career that I stopped doing politics when I left the youth section of the party —
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: — quite early, to become a lawyer.
OLAF SCHOLZ: To become a lawyer, more or less, yes. So I started at the end of my career as a politician in the youth, but I ended all the things I did in the youth organization. And there were years where I had no political function and just did my job. And this was very helpful for me, because there are different careers — and I don’t say there is one that is the better way to do it — but it was very helpful for me that I could change my view on things without cameras looking at my face.
If you go directly from the leadership of a youth organization as a very leftist politician in your party and then enter Parliament, everyone can see how you are changing your views — which obviously should happen if you are dealing with life. It was easier for me because I could just do it. No one was asking me why.
Entering Parliament Later in Life
RORY STEWART: You also, Chancellor, came into Parliament relatively late. I remember when I became an MP, an old minister saying, “You must enter Parliament before you’re 35 if you’re to have a career.” And increasingly in British politics, many people come in quite young, or have stayed in the party movement through their twenties — they’re almost professional politicians. You’re quite unusual. You entered Parliament for the first time when you were almost 40, so you had nearly 20 years outside.
OLAF SCHOLZ: I have to tell you that there was a small part of the big campaign of Gerhard Schröder to become Chancellor and for us to lead the country, saying we are advocating for “40 under 40.”
RORY STEWART: Right.
OLAF SCHOLZ: So there were the first 40 candidates who were not yet 40. I was among them because I had just turned 40 directly before the election. And so I could participate together with the others. Today we luckily have more young candidates for Parliament, especially in my party and in the Green Party. But this was not the case at that time.
Schröder’s Legacy and His Relationship with Putin
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: What’s your assessment of Schröder’s reputation today? Insofar as he still has a reputation here, it’s very much fixed, I would say, on his perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin. And I just wonder if you feel he fulfilled the evident political talent that he had.
OLAF SCHOLZ: I want to be very calm, but he took decisions of private business activities that not everyone understood.
RORY STEWART: It’s very difficult. I can sort of understand how he was sympathetic to Russia before 2014. What I can’t understand is why he continued to be an apologist for Putin after 2014, after the Crimean invasion.
OLAF SCHOLZ: No one really discussed it with him, because it is his decision to go this path. We went on another path, and we are going on another path — helping Ukraine to defend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. And we must be very clear about what Putin did. I called it a “Zeitenwende” because he is going against all the agreements we had in the decades before — that borders should not be changed by force. And that is the essential basis for peace in Europe, and also in the world. And we have to stick to this. And this is why it is the correct decision that we support Ukraine.
Germany’s Dependence on Russian Energy
RORY STEWART: If we go back to your time as Finance Minister — Germany was becoming disastrously dependent on Russian energy. Were there a lot of discussions inside the government before 2014? Were you aware of the risks and the vulnerability before 2014?
OLAF SCHOLZ: All the decisions of selling parts — or allowing parts — of the gas storage infrastructure to be sold to a Russian company were made before I entered government. This is also true when it comes to the question of the gas pipelines. They were already built, more or less. But there was a discussion, and I started it. Due to my experience as the Mayor of Hamburg, I had worked for a very long time on having LNG terminals in the coastal areas, in the ports of northern Germany. I knew all the projects that were being discussed by private entrepreneurs. And so when the crisis started — even before the war started — I could go back to this and ask, in January 2022, before the war started, that we should look at these projects and find a way to import gas from other places.
RORY STEWART: But Chancellor, the problem, of course, is clear not in 2022, but in 2014, when he goes into Crimea. So how did Germany get into that position before 2014? And why was there not a more dramatic change after 2014?
Coalition Politics and the Rise of Populism
OLAF SCHOLZ: We all together should have done more with a stricter regime of sanctions, reacting to the Crimean invasion. And we can discuss why so many people thought it’s not a critical aspect to have so many gas infrastructure from Russia going to Germany, it’s just more pipelines. And the second was that due a long time, even of critical moments and crises between West and East, it was never a problem with this transport of gas to Germany and to the West. So many thought this would always be the case.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned the difference, some of the differences between UK and German politics. And of course, one of the big differences is the electoral system. You go into elections basically knowing that you’re going to be part of a coalition. And I just wonder what that experience is like when you fight a campaign against Angela Merkel and then you end up being her deputy and then you have to work together, and whether that is ever going to be a completely fruitful relationship. To my mind, it’s hard to understand how you even make that work.
RORY STEWART: Because the analogy for a British system would be Labour running against the Conservatives and then ending up, I don’t know, with someone like Edmund Byrne becoming
OLAF SCHOLZ: Cameron’s deputy. But it is the typical system in most of the countries of the world. So it could also work. Just let me say it like this.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I’m just interested in how that feels as a politician, when you feel so passionately about what you believe in and then you go into a grand coalition as the junior partner to the person who’s won the election and who has some similarities of view and personality, but basically a different view of the world.
OLAF SCHOLZ: The experience of coalition governments we had in the Weimar Republic, but also in the new Democratic Federal Republic of Germany, was easier in the beginning, especially in the Federal Republic, since it was usually a coalition of a big and a small party. So in the case of Germany in the first years and decades, a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Liberal Party, and in 1966 the first grand coalition took place in West Germany. And this was the way for the Social Democratic Party to then in 1969 be successful in the election campaign.
And it was important. I read a lot of texts about the debates in the parliamentary faction of the 1960s — why in 1966 we didn’t try to have a coalition with the Liberal Party. And one of the reasons why this did not happen was that the leadership then thought it was too early, the people would not accept it, and too many of the conservative elites would from day one try to spoil all the work of the government. So it was a necessary experience for the public and the people that they saw us in government, which had not been the case for a long time in the Federal Republic.
And then there was the coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Liberals up to 1982. And it changed again then with Helmut Kohl, which worked up till 1998. The next grand coalition was 2005. So it is not the natural system that the main competing parties rule together, but due to the outcome of elections we did so quite often — 2005–09, 2013–17, and then again in 2018 after the attempt to form a government of Conservatives, Liberals and Greens did not work. And we started with the next grand coalition, where I became the Vice Chancellor.
As you noted, it is possible to work together, but it creates a necessity. You should not argue as a campaigner in a way that this is something you cannot imagine. You should be ready to give the people the idea that life is full of compromises.
On Russia, Putin, and the Road to War
RORY STEWART: Do you find it easier now that you’re not Chancellor to talk more openly about mistakes in relation to Russia? I mean, obviously when you were Chancellor, you were having to defend the government’s record. But can you now see that mistakes were made in terms of Germany’s relationship to Russia?
OLAF SCHOLZ: I think the biggest mistake in politics is done by Putin, who started a war against Ukraine. And I am deeply convinced today that he planned for this war two years before. And this is very important because there are so many people using — I have to say — Russian narratives about the reasons for the war that are not true.
Before the war, we had talks with Putin about the question of NATO membership. And it was clear by all leaders that this would not happen very soon. And it was said publicly and behind closed doors in Kyiv and Moscow. So everyone knew, and especially Putin knew. He was discussing the size of the Ukrainian army. He was demanding demilitarization, which is unacceptable, obviously. But now he has come to the point of facing the demand that this should be an army of 800,000 — which is really the opposite of what he was asking for — and many other things.
But to come back to this point, this tragedy to Europe happens because of the imperial idea of Russia that Putin is following. And he thinks that his country should include Belarus and Ukraine. And he wrote it on paper and said it publicly.
RORY STEWART: But why was it such a surprise for you?
OLAF SCHOLZ: Many were not surprised about the nature of Russian politics. So we are, with good reason, members of NATO, as everyone else in NATO. We knew about the necessity of defence and about spending for defence. We had to increase, and we are doing it. But in the end, not too many of us were naive about the question of what Russia is looking for.
And I especially was very clear. I used a speech in St. Petersburg to speak about it — that Russia should not look for going back to a Europe of the 17th, 18th, 19th century, where the big powers of Europe, Russia, England, France, and in the beginning Prussia and Habsburg, and later Germany and Austria, are dealing amongst themselves. And this is not how it works. There is the European Union for most of the European states, and there is NATO. And this will not end. And no one in the West of Europe, none of the members of NATO and of the European Union, not the UK, is planning to go aggressively against Russia. This is not true. So he is accusing the Western states of a strategy they are not following.
RORY STEWART: (fire alarm sounds) CFSB, please leave the building immediately. Please leave the building immediately by the nearest exit. I think it’s real.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Thank you for dealing with the fire alarm disturbance, which was obviously organised by the Russians while we were talking about Vlad.
The Rise of the AfD and Right-Wing Populism
And while we were chatting in the park near the Robert Burns statue, we talked about Donald Trump. And I just wanted to broaden that out to the whole thing of populism. And in particular, something else we talked about on Monday — your analysis as to why the Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD, have become such a powerful force within German politics. Where do you think that’s all coming from?
OLAF SCHOLZ: First, it is necessary to state that they now have approximately 25% in the polls. This is not the majority. All the other people are thinking in a completely different direction. And this is why we agreed so far, and I hope we will continue to do so, that no one will cooperate with this party.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: It’s the Brandmauer — the firewall.
OLAF SCHOLZ: There is a firewall, yes, and it makes sense. Not for keeping them small, because that is a question of political campaigning and political debate, but to avoid that they are going to power. The most important critique I have of the AfD is not about their political position on one topic or another — that is open to debate. In a democracy, it is that they are an anti-pluralistic party. And anti-pluralistic means that they do not accept that all of us citizens are “we.” So they create a sort of “we” which excludes others.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: But aren’t you doing that by saying that they shouldn’t have any position in government?
OLAF SCHOLZ: I just say that a party in a democracy must be in favour of democracy, and democracy is pluralism. And this means that you cannot exclude people from the “we” that we are as citizens. The second is that we have a lot of doubts that if they were able to reach power in one way or another, they would use that power in a way that would not allow them to be removed by democratic elections later. So these are the two essential questions.
And coming to the question of why there is this rise of right-wing populist parties — we see it in Germany, and looking from a broader perspective at the whole world, at the rich countries — why are they there in Finland, in Sweden, more or less in Denmark, in Norway, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, in the United States, the United Kingdom? We have to analyse why this is happening.
I have two reasons that seem important to me. The first is the success of globalisation, which many people react to with some fear about their own future, or the future of people like them. We saw it since the beginning of the 1980s, when a lot of cheap, badly paid industrial production moved to many countries of the Global South — especially, but not only, China. Due to some statistics, the big majority of industrial production is now in the Global South, completely different to the time before China opened in 1979. And so many people think: will there be good and well-paid jobs in 10, 20, 30, 40 years? The answer we could give is yes, if we do the right things and embrace jobs with new technologies. And that will give us the chance of being successful. And it is not problematic if there are also wealthy people all over the world and not just in North America and Europe.
And the second reason is one of the outcomes of our success when it comes to education. We should not forget that in the 1950s, just a very small portion of the population had the chance to reach the highest outcomes at school and to go to university. Now it is many more people, but we are still one country and we should be. And looking down on others is a new phenomenon of the rich countries which splits our societies. This is why I think — and I used the chance to give a speech on this at the LSE — that we could learn a lot from the book by Michael Young about The Rise of the Meritocracy, because it explains what is happening in the United States and in our countries.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned this book at the dinner we had on Monday. And you were saying it was one of the most important books you’ve ever read. And you actually said that I should go away and read it again, because if you don’t read that book and understand it, you don’t understand Nigel Farage and why he is what he’s become in our politics. Just explain that.
OLAF SCHOLZ: So it is a satirical work, written as a sociological book, which it is not. He wrote it in the year of my birth, 1958. And it describes the situation of 2033, 2034 — so the future to come. But if you read this book, you find all the things that have happened to us in the last decades and at this very time. And he was so good at looking into the future — at what might be one of the outcomes of one of the successes of our society, giving more people opportunities.
My view is that if someone running a hospital looks down on the person doing the plumber’s job, the society will not work. This has consequences for payment, for security, yes, but much more for the question of respect. And if I go to a restaurant and do not think that those producing my coffee or my meal are equals, we will not have the chance of a good society. And this has to be changed. This is my deep conviction. And it is the most relevant question for the United States, for the United Kingdom, for Europe, and for all the rich countries of the North.
East Germany, the AfD, and the Limits of Economic Explanations
RORY STEWART: Chancellor, just to develop this a bit more — the AfD is now leading in all the East German states. But the standard of living in East Germany has increased so much since reunification. It’s much, much richer than somewhere like Hungary in terms of the development that’s taken place. It’s extraordinary. And yet the German left often suggests that the reason why people are voting for the AfD is because they are socially and economically deprived. But in fact, the statistics suggest that East Germany’s progress since reunification has been unbelievably positive in terms of growth, as you have recognised.
The Meritocracy Trap and the Politics of Respect
OLAF SCHOLZ: I have not used this argument. We need a society of respect and this is a cultural habit which we have to evolve. But it’s also a question of how we discuss about social welfare and things like that. But the main question is that we understand ourselves as equals, that we don’t think “I’m better than the other.”
And the second question this comes to is the question of job security. If we are looking at all the changes in the world when it comes to technology, when it comes to globalization, if we see the politics with tariffs Trump is making, it has two aspects. The conservative think tankers, for instance, Aurora and Cass, proposed a certain tax, but just for getting jobs back, which to my mind will not work as it is thought. But in the end it is a debate about jobs. He is using it for pressing people in other countries to do the one or the other thing — this Orange has never proposed. And he’s absolutely critical about this question.
But it has to do with one aspect, which is a new phenomenon in modern life, that the success of economy makes it feasible that after the ending of colonialisation in the 70s, now we are in a phase where many of the countries of the Global South will become strong, wealthy and will have a lot of production, which is good. But not everyone is sure if the outcome will be good for us.
RORY STEWART: Also, the risk is that the 50% who go to university think that they are better than the 50% who don’t. And then you create a two-tier society that’s very disturbing.
OLAF SCHOLZ: Yes. And you see that there are a lot of authors now discussing the question, many of them referring to Michael Young, for instance, The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. We have a new book which is discussing the meritocracy trap. Branko Milanovic, a very good economist, is writing about the new elite in the United States, which is rich and having assets on the one side and on the other side, well educated.
If we see it in some countries like the United States — and it’s also a question, I think, here it is also depending on the money your parents can spend on university, which is not the case in every other country, for instance, not in Germany. But we also have the question of dealing with the fact that we have to find a way how we unite again after the success of education campaigns in the past decades. And we will not be able to go back. It would be a big catastrophe for our economy.
But if one of your friends has a son or a daughter who, after a very good education at school, decides to become a baker — if this is your profession, do it.
RORY STEWART: It’s a good job.
OLAF SCHOLZ: For thousands of years we needed bakers and we will in the future. And that’s, I think, a problem. And we have to change this as a mood.
Let me come back to the right populists. In this case, they have a wrong answer — searching for enemies. So in times of crisis, there is always one that is offering this answer: searching for enemies in their own country, searching for enemies abroad. But solving the questions of our society has nothing to do with searching for enemies. It has something to do with being at a high level of technological advancement in the society, with working for good infrastructure for growth, which is a big question for me, and speeding up investment into infrastructure and things like that.
Populism, Disrespect, and the Immigration Debate
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I agree with the whole theme of respect and a sense of equality and people treating each other as equals and so forth. But the problem at the moment is that this populist wave is led globally by Trump, with a lot of outriders all around the world. And he emanates constantly a sense of disrespect — a sense of “unless you’re with me, you don’t matter.” It’s not a class thing. It’s “are you with me or are you against me?”
OLAF SCHOLZ: When I speak about respect, I speak about how we look at each other in a society. You can do it very psychologically — be always a very friendly man, be polite to others and things like that. But this is good also. But when I speak about respect, it is on the basis of how we look at each other and our professions and how we are contributing to society.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: We talked the other evening about immigration and you said some very interesting things about Germany — that it has always been a country of immigrants, and perhaps a lot more than people’s general understanding of Germany suggests. But if you look at the debate on the populist right about immigrants and immigration, it is about disrespect. And that’s why I think it’s very hard to see how you take what you’re saying in the current political climate and build it into a winning political strategy.
OLAF SCHOLZ: I’m sure that most people in our societies — also here in the UK — understand that nothing would work if we had not had the advantage of especially work migration to our countries in the past. We have different traditions and history on migration. The British is very much influenced by the former empire. Similar to France, for instance. In Germany, it was the request for labour coming from Portugal, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco in the 60s — these were the starting points. So we have different histories.
But in the end the people stay, they live with their families, they go to school, and the children or grandchildren make great careers in our society. It works. And this is why I think that the question of citizenship is essential, and there is a readiness among most of the people to see it as I explain it here.
We have the question of asylum, where we have to be ready to support people that are in danger. And especially as a German, I have to say that we are so happy that the UK, for instance, gave so many people a chance to survive the Nazi dictatorship and fascism. And this is something we should have in mind when we look at others that are in danger.
And we have to manage the question of irregular migration, which will not end as a task for the next 20, 30, 40 years. Because there is a world where so many people are today living in economic circumstances that leads them to think of moving to other places — as many Europeans did when the settlers moved to what is today the United States.
Wages, Respect, and the Economics of Dignity
RORY STEWART: What are the policy implications of your respect? Because it’s all very well saying we show respect — and you’ve said it’s not just about politeness — but the truth of the matter is that the people working as a baker earn much less money than the people working as bankers. There are opportunities for their voices to be heard in the media. The whole of society seems to be oriented around high incomes, high wealth, high visibility. So you can say we want to show more respect for people in traditional blue-collar jobs. But how do you make that work as a politician, as a policy?
OLAF SCHOLZ: Together with my party, as our sister party here in the UK, I fought very much for implementing a system of minimum wages. So this is not a very high wage, but it is much better than it was before. And I’m very much in favour of increasing it — it was part of my last two campaigns and we succeeded again in increasing the minimum wage in Germany, which has an impact on the whole ladder of wages for many people. Because if the minimum wage rises, the others rise too.
RORY STEWART: But it is not itself — it can’t be —
OLAF SCHOLZ: Sufficient on its own, but it is part of it. You cannot say to someone “I respect you” and have them unable to pay for their living costs. And we should be ready — especially when we are well-paid managers, scientists, or as myself a lawyer — we should be ready to pay more when we go to a shop.
RORY STEWART: You would pay more than somebody else in the shop?
OLAF SCHOLZ: No — that we should be ready to pay for the wages of those working there. And we should not demand prices that could not be achieved without too low payment for those working.
RORY STEWART: But what you will do is you will push that problem to China. I mean, they will continue to work on minimum wages and then you will feel good about yourself inside Germany.
OLAF SCHOLZ: I worked as a labour lawyer for 13 years before I entered Parliament in 1998. And I visited a lot of factories since then — again, as a mayor, as a minister, as a Chancellor. I can tell you that in all those years you can always see what the increasing of productivity makes possible. So we have a chance for having production sites in our countries if they are at the highest standard of productivity using new technologies. And we should be able to have enough jobs for us in our countries.
I think the whole European Union has a workforce of approximately 230 million people. If you look at China, it’s much more. So having enough well-paid jobs for our people is something that is very manageable.
Life After Power
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: When we had dinner the other night, you said something really interesting — it was the first thing you said when I said hello. I asked, “Are you missing the job of being Chancellor?” And you said no. And you then went on to explain why you felt you were maybe managing post-Chancellor life better than maybe some people that I know manage their life after power.
OLAF SCHOLZ: Already when I became the mayor of the city of Hamburg — the 198th mayor of the city state of Hamburg — and seeing all the pictures of my predecessors in the dress of the Spanish court, I thought: you will be longer an ex-mayor than a mayor. Having a job should mean that you are absolutely sure that it will sooner or later end, and that you will continue to have quite a proper life. That if you make it good, you are a person talking to others about the problems of our time. But that’s it.
I’m always looking at others. And what impressed me very much was this short TV film we saw about Putin and Xi discussing expanding lifetime — eternal life. This has been, since thousands of years, the main question of those who are having or had relevant power — that too many of them could not imagine that they will die sooner or later as we all will, and that it is a small part of life that may be relevant, but that it is not forever. And we have to understand this as men, as human beings — that we are just a short time on earth.
Engineers, Lawyers, and the Burden of Bureaucracy
RORY STEWART: We were talking before we started the interview about a world run by engineers and a world run by lawyers. And some people might suggest that some of the problems that we face are the fact that all our countries are basically run by lawyers and the mentality of lawyers.
OLAF SCHOLZ: The big economic rise of Germany and America in the 19th century was because of the engineers and the entrepreneurs working with them — sometimes they were the same. And if we look, for instance, at China, it is today a country run by engineers — with not enough rules to protect people, yes. But possibly in the 60s in North America and in Europe, the lawyers were too successful in creating procedures for investment that make it so difficult to succeed.
And the people here in our country see that in other places of the world they build a whole metropolitan railway system or a whole national railway system in 20 years, whereas we built a new railway line of 20 kilometres during those same 20 years. And we should go back to the situation we had in the 60s — that there has to be the chance for controlling government decisions at court, but we have to reduce the aspects that should be controlled, because we have to make it easier to have a decision on a new street railway, university, hospital, port, airport, and so on.
The Firewall Against the AfD
RORY STEWART: At the moment, Chancellor Merz and the CDU are keeping this firewall. But do you think the CDU will be able to always keep the firewall against the AfD? Because there will be pressures in two years, three years, four years within that party to say, “Come on, if we’re going to take power, we’re going to have to deal with these people.”
OLAF SCHOLZ: I know many conservative politicians who truly and wholeheartedly think they will never work together with right-wing, right-populist politicians. And if they look around, they see all conservative parties failed that went down that path. So it is not good advice to do it this way. And it’s important for democracy. So I hope — and I think — they will not.
Brexit: Ten Years On
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: My last question — Rory won’t be surprised to know — relates to Brexit. We’re coming up to the 10th anniversary of the referendum. Your judgment of the effect of Brexit both on the UK and on Europe, and your view as to whether you think this reset that the British government is trying to put in place can eventually lead to something akin to the kind of partnership we had before.
Closing Thoughts on Brexit, Europe, and the Fire Alarm
OLAF SCHOLZ: It looks like the judgment of nearly every political party in Europe is that they will not follow the way — even the very conservative ones are not discussing leaving the Union. Second, I think that it is up to the British to decide how they want to have their relations with the European Union. But the UK can always rely on Germany — if there is the wish for bettering the cooperation, we will be on their side.
RORY STEWART: A tiny follow-up from this. Is there going to be enough imagination? I mean, one of the worries that I have is that your lawyers will get involved instead of politicians saying, “Here is a big idea — Britain, European Union, Ukraine, security architecture.” Instead, we will be fighting about this clause in the single market, which the civil servants and lawyers will dominate. So is there the vision, the ambition, to reimagine what Europe could be?
OLAF SCHOLZ: I think there is a vision that politicians are willing to follow, and if they are engaged enough, they will look into the details so that the bureaucrats are not alone.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Okay, listen — thank you for your time. Thank you for dealing with that deeply annoying fire alarm. I presume there was no fire.
RORY STEWART: We don’t know. We don’t know. But anyway, Chancellor, thank you. I’m glad we got you out of the fire, and despite Alastair, who would have tried to continue through the fire, I think it’s probably right that we left. Thank you so much.
OLAF SCHOLZ: Thank you.
RORY STEWART: Thank you.
Post-Interview Reflections
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Bloody fire alarm.
RORY STEWART: Your least favourite thing, apart from people eating popcorn next to you in a cinema.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: It’s sort of unnecessary disruption, though.
RORY STEWART: It’s one of those amazing things — as people may have picked up at the end, it was a pretty extreme situation. There were these voices saying, “Get out of the building.” And of course, everybody nowadays, instead of getting out of the building, is wandering around saying, “Are you sure this isn’t a test? We really need to move.”
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: To be fair to him, as soon as it started, he picked up his jacket and got out, and off we went.
RORY STEWART: I noticed his assistant, though, saying to me, “But it didn’t sound very urgent.” I was like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. Anyway, we’re back in.
Firstly, he’s at his strongest, I think, when he’s talking about ideas and books. His fluency — you picked up on the youth thing and his mention of Michael Sandel, who’s a Harvard professor.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Well, at the dinner the other night — I mean, if he had an Olaf Scholz book club — he was just reeling them out. Books he’d read about the history of Britain, the Labour Party, philosophy. He’s very, very well read. I think you’re right. He comes to life when he’s thinking about and talking about big ideas.
Germany’s Russia Policy: Missed Warnings and Unanswered Questions
RORY STEWART: Most listeners, and even most German listeners, will be completely depressed and astonished that he still cannot quite bring himself to admit that they totally underestimated the threat from Putin and didn’t do enough to prepare. Just to run through the details — he was the finance minister before 2014. They became completely dependent on Russian gas. He says they were trying to invest in LNG in Hanover. And then even after 2014, they did almost nothing.
When he’s trying to talk about what he did, he’s all about what happened in 2022 — no real acknowledgement, maybe because of embarrassment, that Gerhard Schröder, who had been an extremely impressive chancellor, then became an employee, centrally, of the Russian state oil company and a massive apologist for Putin — right in the heart of the party, never expelled. Why do you think they can’t quite bring themselves to just say, “Okay, yes, in retrospect, we made two or three mistakes”?
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Well, in further proof, Rory, that you’re actually morphing from being a politician into a sort of hard-headed tabloid journalist — I should explain to your listeners and viewers that when we went outside, you were asking him exactly that question: “Why can’t you admit to a few mistakes?” And the answer he gave you, I think, was essentially, “Well, I’m still a politician.”
I guess what he’s thinking is — he’s now out of power. I got the feeling, even with Schröder, let alone with Merkel or Merz today, he didn’t really want to criticize any of his successors, which by and large I think is quite a good thing in a former leader.
But I think also he might be worried because, if you remember, he framed that part of the conversation about Ukraine around how worried he was that so many people deploy the Kremlin narrative. So I guess he’s worrying that it kind of lets Putin off the hook to say, “Somehow we made terrible mistakes in the preparation.”
And I guess also the political survivor in him is thinking, “Well, okay, I was the finance minister for a lot of this time and then I was the Chancellor. I actually got a lot of credit and praise for the Zeitenwende speech and for the 100 billion euros in extra defence spending.” Whereas Angela Merkel has taken a lot of the blame.
RORY STEWART: Yes.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: So whether there’s a bit of that going on.
RORY STEWART: I mean, the question I wanted to ask was: you made this enormous speech, you committed the 100 billion, but then essentially you dragged your feet. He left in place a defence minister who was clearly very uncomfortable with being proactive on Ukraine, and it took a long time before Pistorius was brought in. He was extremely reluctant, continually, on various different weapons systems, which were always delivered six months, twelve months too late. But of course, if I’d pushed that, I would have got the same shutout that I got on everything else.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Funnily enough, at the dinner I mentioned on Monday — there were only about half a dozen people there — one of them was rather more politely making exactly that point, to which he did a big thing about how Germany is now the big spender on Ukraine and “we’re the ones who are driving this.” So yeah, I think you’re right.
The way that he speaks is quite flat in style. And he was obviously asking in the breaks, “How’s my English?” — and I thought his English was very, very good.
OLAF SCHOLZ: Brilliant.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Even when he’s speaking in German, he’s got this quite flat delivery. But I don’t know if you noticed — he says a lot more with his eyes sometimes than he does with his words. You can read his eyes quite clearly. He’s got amazing eye contact. I noticed this at the dinner. When he speaks to you, he’s absolutely locked onto you, and sometimes his eyes are kind of dancing around, saying different things.
The two things I wanted to get stuck into, which we didn’t — one was the Middle East.
RORY STEWART: He decided, didn’t he, to put a lot of support behind Israel.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: He was behind Israel. He did go to Jerusalem at one point and do a press conference with Netanyahu where he was pretty — not where you and I might have been, but certainly in terms of human rights and the treatment of the Palestinians. And then the second thing, which I guess relates to what’s happening in UK politics at the moment — I noticed the other day Keir Starmer’s positive rating is at 18% or something. 18% positive. Which at one point was Scholz’s ratings too.
And I wanted to get into whether he ever actually thought the right thing might be to throw in the towel and let Boris Pistorius come in. Now, again, he would have said no. And he would have then said, “Look, okay, I didn’t win — but look, the SPD are in power with Merz, and Kling is doing a good job.” I don’t know. I think he’s an interesting guy. He told me over dinner that he is writing a book. I think he’ll write an interesting book.
RORY STEWART: Yeah.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And he actually said, “One of the things I’m absolutely determined to do is write every word myself.”
RORY STEWART: Yeah.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Whereas a lot of them don’t.
A Reassessment: The Man Behind the “Boring Chancellor” Narrative
RORY STEWART: No, no — I’m sure it will be. I saw the charm of the man. I’m afraid that, knowing nothing about him, I had basically bought into the narrative that this was a slightly boring chancellor — a guy who had led the SPD when their polling ratings had actually dropped below the AfD and were looking pretty catastrophic.
But actually meeting him in person, I thought: this is a highly civilised, thoughtful man. I liked his reflections on his youth. It’s difficult to convey completely for an international audience what was going on in Germany in the 1980s, but he was right out there — a kind of proto-Marxist, meeting with East German communists, opposing American nuclear weapons. And he definitely — although he denied this to you — was making statements that were skeptical about NATO. And the journey to where he is now is remarkable.
I think quite a lot of people on the left that we interview are like that. They were often much more radical in their youth than they ended up being. But I thought he handled it well, without losing his moral compass.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: It was fascinating — what he said about having a gap, being able to make the transition out of the public eye.
RORY STEWART: But I think the respect point is very interesting. It’s an incredibly powerful understanding of something going wrong in our society. I think that’s right — very large numbers of people may, as he says, have seen their standards of living improve objectively. They may have more disposable income than their parents. But they feel patronised, condescended to, pushed aside. I’m not sure, though, that his policy solution is quite up to the scale of the problem.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I don’t think the minimum wage quite does it. But the other point he made in that discussion about respect at dinner the other night was — he was talking about Trump’s rise, saying: “To understand it, you have to understand the north versus the south in terms of the globe.” Not just rich people versus poor people, or elite versus working class within our societies, but actually the sense that those poorer people in our societies basically feel that those at the top have been helping the poorer people in the global south more than they’ve helped people here.
And he was making the argument that actually, we can lift up the global south and do it in a way that lifts us all. That’s, I think, where he worries about where the politics are right now.
My final point — what did you think about his argument on the Brandmauer? In the sense that whatever happens, however they poll, the SPD, the CDU, and the FDP should have absolutely nothing to do with the AfD.
The Brandmauer and the Far-Right Firewall
RORY STEWART: It strikes me that we are very, very lucky, actually, to have Friedrich Merz being so clear and strong as a conservative — saying, “I’m not going to have anything to do with the far right.” Because the electoral mathematics, once you’ve got 25% of people voting for the far right, the temptation is enormous. Look at the temptation the Conservative Party will be feeling with Reform when they go into the next election. There’ll be people pushing for an electoral pact, there’ll be people defecting.
So maybe naively, I believe in Merz. I think so long as he’s there, he’ll hold that line. I’m much less confident that his successor will find it as easy to hold.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Well, there we are. I don’t know whether Gerhard Schröder would become our third former chancellor to come on.
RORY STEWART: As usual, I’ve screwed it up — like my Macron criticisms.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Yeah, well, we’re still talking about that, Rory. But you know, I’m just saying — by the way, don’t ever listen to our podcast. It’s not worth listening to. I wouldn’t. I’ll send you five clips, but I really wouldn’t bother listening to it.
RORY STEWART: Thank you very much. See you soon. Well done.
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