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Earlier this month, as he prepared to give one of the most important speeches of his political career, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany appeared before Parliament in a suit that appeared at least a size or two too large.
It was an apt metaphor. Mr. Scholz has never seemed a natural fit as chancellor. He was an unlikely selection to lead his Social Democratic Party four years ago. Now, his popularity has sunk, his government has broken up, and Mr. Scholz finds himself fighting for his political life.
With a snap election looming in February, some in Mr. Scholz’s party have begun to entertain what would be an almost unheard-of development in German politics: dumping their incumbent chancellor in favor of a more charismatic leader, in hopes of scoring a come-from-behind victory and remaining in power.
The discussions among party members — and the news media — have early echoes of the push in the Democratic Party to encourage President Biden to end his re-election bid amid mounting voter concerns about his age. Mr. Biden eventually stepped aside, and his replacement on the ballot, Vice President Kamala Harris, lost in November to former President Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Scholz still appears likely to hold on to his place atop the Social Democratic Party ticket. Unlike Mr. Biden, no one in his party has voiced concerns over his fitness to lead the country for another four years. Party leaders will decide who stands as their chancellor candidate, and for now, they are publicly standing behind Mr. Scholz.
But two weeks after Mr. Scholz ended his three-party coalition by firing his finance minister, leading to rare snap elections and political uncertainty in Europe’s most powerful country, his fate is uncertain. Every other party has formally designated their top candidate for the Feb. 23 federal election.
Mr. Scholz’s party, known as the S.P.D., its German initials, has not. And the longer the debate rages, the more it could hurt Mr. Scholz’s chances — and his party’s standing in the polls.
“The uncertainty is damaging the S.P.D. as a whole, and it is particularly damaging to Olaf Scholz,” said Uwe Jun, a political scientist at the University of Trier who studies German parties and campaigns.
Whoever leads the Social Democrats in the coming election will face a daunting challenge. The conservative Christian Democratic Union is outperforming the Social Democrats by 18 percentage points in opinion polls. Few people in Germany doubt that the next chancellor will be the man leading the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz. Mr. Scholz’s party currently polls in third place, behind the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
But some Social Democrats are wondering if having another candidate — one less associated with the failures of the current government — would not be better for the party.
Boosting their case is the fact that the Social Democrats already possess a popular potential alternative to Mr. Scholz: Boris Pistorius, the country’s defense minister.
The rebellion within the party grew louder last Monday when two party leaders of the mighty North Rhine-Westphalia chapter of the Social Democrats opened the door for Mr. Pistorius’ candidacy.
“The central question is what the best political positioning is now for this federal election,” Dirk Wiese and Wiebke Esdar, two lawmakers with the Social Democrats, wrote in a statement released Monday night. “We are hearing a lot of encouragement for Boris Pistorius,” they added.
The decision to pick a chancellor candidate was expected to be made by the party leadership next Monday, but given how much the discussion has hurt the Social Democrats, the leadership committee could meet sooner to name the top candidate and stop the bleeding.
With top party officials still backing his candidacy very publicly, Mr. Scholz has the upper hand. But the fact that replacing him is even being debated — and has dominated headlines and talk shows — is a major problem for the man fighting to stay chancellor.
Mr. Scholz, who returned from the Group of 20 meeting in Brazil on Wednesday, has done everything to quell the challenge. His strategy appears to be to remind his party that he won an uphill battle during the last election, beating out the favored conservative Christian Democrats by 1.5 percentage points in 2021, despite earlier polling that suggested he had no chance.
“The S.P.D. and I want to win together. And we have already shown that we can do that — even from a starting position where the polls did not suggest it likely,” he told a German public broadcaster in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday.
Mr. Scholz was not especially well-liked by the rank-and-file Social Democrats in 2021, making him an unlikely candidate for chancellor. But most in the party accepted his candidacy as the only way to beat the Christian Democrats. He has similarities in that respect to Mr. Biden, who has been a close ally of Mr. Scholz in their overlapping tenures: Mr. Biden won the 2020 Democratic nomination in part on the strength of his argument that he was best positioned among Democrats to defeat Mr. Trump.
Torsten Faas, a political expert at the Freie Universität Berlin, says that whoever ultimately leads the party into the next election, discord within the Social Democratic Party comes at a perilous time.
“The S.P.D.’s unity, which distinguished it in 2021, has vanished — at least for now,” he wrote in an email exchange. “Whoever the candidate turns out to be will be viewed critically within the party,” Mr. Faas added.
Momentum has grown for Mr. Scholz’s defense minister, Mr. Pistorius.
Both men hail from Osnabrück, a sleepy town in Lower Saxony, in West Germany. Mr. Pistorius entered the national political stage only last year, after many years serving as the town’s mayor and later a state minister.
Though charged with the exceedingly difficult task of reviving Germany’s derelict armed forces, Mr. Pistorius routinely tops the polls of most popular national politicians.
Known for his frank and unadorned speech, Mr. Pistorius has always insisted that he had no greater ambitions than being the country’s defense minister and has defended Mr. Scholz’s chancellorship.
But that too has changed. Asked on Monday whether he would jump in for Mr. Scholz, Mr. Pistorius demurred. “The only thing I can definitely rule out is becoming pope,” he said.
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