A Social Democratic German chancellor lagging in the opinion polls vows adamantly not to join a war. Support for his SPD party rallies and he narrowly clings to power.
By refusing to supply Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine despite an outcry among western allies, Olaf Scholz may be hoping that history will repeat itself and he can replicate Gerhard Schröder’s 2002 stunt before the US-led invasion of Iraq when he refused to provide troops or money.
With Scholz’s popularity at a record low, the economy likely in recession and his three-party coalition lurching from one crisis to the next, the chancellor appears to be trying to rally voters behind his rejection of calls from Kyiv, Paris and London to deliver the potentially game-changing weapons to the embattled Ukrainians.
The SPD has proclaimed itself the “peace party” ever since the original Friedenskanzler (peace chancellor), Willy Brandt, knelt at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial in 1970 to atone for the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s rape of Poland. It was Brandt who launched Ostpolitik – the pursuit of east-west reconciliation through diplomacy and trade – which remains the SPD’s proudest foreign policy accomplishment, for which many members are nostalgic today.
The party has always had a strong pacifist streak, reflecting Germans’ angst about a return to war. After the second world war, the SPD initially advocated a neutral, reunified and demilitarised Germany, only embracing Nato membership in 1959. Recent opinion surveys show that more than half of Germans fear that Russia’s war in Ukraine will spread to Nato countries and draw in Germany. Such fears can only have been exacerbated by images of carnage from last month’s terror attack on a Moscow concert hall, and President Putin’s attempts to link Ukraine to the Islamic State gunmen who carried out the slaughter.
Languishing at around 15% in the polls ahead of the 9 June European Parliament elections, the Social Democrats are tempted to play the peace card one more time, even though it was Scholz who declared a Zeitenwende (turning point) in German foreign and defence policy after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. He scrapped the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, announced a €100bn (£85bn) special fund to bolster the country’s rusting armed forces and, after lengthy hesitation, began sending weapons to Kyiv.
Now, the dour chancellor alternates between boasting that Berlin is Ukraine’s biggest European arms provider, with €17.1bn in military assistance since the war began, and rejecting pleas from within his own coalition, the conservative opposition, western allies and from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to supply Taurus missiles.
His public justification is that it would require German soldiers in Ukraine to help operate and target the missiles, bringing Berlin closer to war with Moscow. But when the UK’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, proposed a way around that obstacle, saying that the UK could send more of its own Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine if Germany gave London the Taurus, Scholz rejected the idea, declaring: “I am the chancellor, so that’s it.”
Scholz also rebuffed French president Emmanuel Macron’s statement that sending ground troops to Ukraine could not be ruled out if the situation deteriorated, declaring flatly that “there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or Nato states.”
Scholz’s party comrades have gone further, musing aloud about a ceasefire that would leave Russia in control of the swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine that it has seized since 2022. Rolf Mützenich, parliamentary leader of the SPD, asked this month: “Isn’t it time that we not only talk about how to wage war, but also think about how we can freeze the war and later end it?”
Coalition lawmaker Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the liberal Free Democrats, and chair of the parliamentary defence committee, branded his speech a scandalous example of “SPD appeasement policy”.
Even inside the SPD, some prominent intellectuals have begun to criticise Scholz’s line. A group of five Social Democratic historians, led by Prof Heinrich August Winkler of Berlin’s Humboldt University, said in an open letter to party leaders that the SPD had failed to hold an honest reckoning with the errors of German policy towards Russia over past decades. They accused them of using “arbitrary, erratic and not infrequently factually false arguments” to justify restricting arms deliveries to Kyiv. And former European affairs minister Michael Roth announced he was quitting politics partly because he no longer felt comfortable with the SPD’s policy on Ukraine.
The Social Democrats are struggling to win back lost working-class and young voters who now support either the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) or the newly created left-populist movement led by former communist Sahra Wagenknecht, both of which are strongly anti-war. Hence donning the “peace party” mantle may make tactical sense for the SPD.
But there is another historical precedent that Scholz should consider before seeking short-term electoral advantage at Ukraine’s expense. In 1982, Social Democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt was toppled by his FDP coalition partners after members of his party began to renege on the planned deployment of US medium-range atomic missiles in West Germany to counter Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted at western Europe. It was Schmidt who had originally called for modernising the US nuclear shield to maintain the credibility of Nato’s deterrence.
The SPD’s embrace of the anti-nuclear “peace movement”, which had staged mass demonstrations, led to an election defeat the following year and consigned it to opposition for the next 16 years.
Ironically, the Greens, who entered parliament for the first time in 1983 as a pacifist, anti-nuclear party, are now the most outspoken critics of Russia and supporters of arming Ukraine.
Scholz’s positioning is making it harder for the FDP and the Greens to continue in coalition with the SPD, and could make it more likely that both parties team up with the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) after next year’s general election. The Taurus missiles may not be a sufficient casus belli to persuade Scholz’s partners to jump ship now, but refusing to supply them could backfire on him in the long run if Ukraine was defeated for want of sufficient allied support.
And this time, there may be no comeback for the SPD – Germany’s oldest political party, but a shadow of its former self. Centre-left parties are in decline all over continental Europe, and close to extinction in France and the Netherlands. The German Social Democrats must choose whether they are the party of democracy, human rights and international law, or the party of appeasement.
Paul Taylor is a senior fellow of the Friends of Europe thinktank and author of the report After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe
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