Who is really Olaf Scholz, the winner of the elections in Germany, the only possible candidate for the German chancellery? Who is the politician who revived the dying SPD, leading it to a success that is as surprising as it is unexpected? He is a labor lawyer, who when he smiles looks like a child in an adult face, a man capable of inspiring sympathy but without a shred of charisma, a mild and resolute competitor in regaining a disaffected and critical electorate, but given up for a loser.

It is no mystery that most considered the race to the chancellery a losing game and that Olaf Scholz, the outgoing finance minister of the Grosse Koalition (a crucial role in this time of pandemic and in the start of the EU Next Generation), would have same fate reserved for candidates Peer Steinbrueck and Martin Schulz. In the last two rounds of elections, the candidacy for the German chancellery had become a sort of gallows on which the SPD, for some time in a profound identity crisis, sacrificed its leaders from time to time. The premises for hypothesizing a defeat were all there: the quiet and a little gray Scholz did not like the party base that had already humiliated him when two years ago, at the end of the Congress in 2019, he was a candidate, as a favorite, for the party secretariat. But the majority, critical of the Grosse Koalition, had preferred the duo formed by the unknown Norbert Water-Borjans and Saskia Esken to the faithful militant, who had joined the party since the age of 17. Which is now obviously the victory of the SPD. For Scholz and the moderates of the SPD, the defeat had been a very bitter morsel.

But even on that occasion Scholz did not cause scandals, sure that his art of working hard but under the radar, without fuss, mediating, would sooner or later lead to a good result. This time he did more. He managed to appear to a good chunk of the German electorate as the only credible heir of Angela Merkel, annihilating the CDU candidate, Armin Laschet, in every confrontation. And there is a sentence that sums up the character well. Those who reproached Scholz for the monotonous tone, without enthusiasm, so little empathic, were heard replied: "I am running for chancellor, not for director of the circus." Serious, almost Zen, he was known by the nickname of "Scholzomat", for the sleepy and almost robotic chant with which twenty years ago he defended the unpopular reforms of Gerhard Schröder (those that allowed Germany to face, twenty years later, the crisis on a sound basis).

Reliability, competence, pragmatism, feet on the ground, a gaze capable of looking beyond the contingent, were the ingredients of a personal recipe and a profile that is in part really superimposable to that of the beloved Mutti: Scholz is sober in his manner, competent on the issues of which he speaks and with a long political experience behind him, undertaken just like Merkel, very young.

Scholz was born in Osnabrück in 1958, but grew up in Hamburg. At the age of 17 he joined the youth organization of the SPD, the Jusos. Compared to today, he is a radical: in the articles written at the time, he criticizes the imperialist attitude of NATO and points to Germany as "the bulwark of capitalism in Europe". In 1984 he graduated in law at the University of Hamburg, starting to practice as a lawyer, which he accompanied for a few years in political activity, and in the meantime he moved to the more centrist wing of the party, which allowed him to enter the first government Merkel, becoming Minister for Labor and Social Affairs from 2007 to 2009. He will then be mayor of Hamburg, a role he plays by playing his cards on the social issues that characterized his winning electoral campaign. In the party, to which he dedicates himself with absolute dedication, he also finds his soul mate Britta Ernst.

Like many long-time politicians who have held various positions, Scholz has also been involved in some controversy. Like when he was mayor of Hamburg, and it seems that the Werbung Bank was supposed to return 90 million euros to the municipal coffers as part of the Cum-Ex scandal, but the city has decided to give it up. Episode remained a bit vague, however a shadow that touched him in the countryside but did not jeopardize his success. Which now gives him two chances: to confront the Greens and the Liberals to form a governing coalition (and in recent days they announced that they have reached an agreement on common ground), and to proceed to the collection for the secretariat of a party that he didn't want it.

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