BERLIN — New U.K. Prime Minister Keir is looking for lessons on how to keep a center-left government in power. He won’t be taking any from Olaf Scholz, however.
The new British PM flew into Berlin Tuesday night still basking in the glory of his election victory last month. The man he is meeting, German Chancellor Scholz, is on the opposite trajectory, languishing in the polls and facing a likely election defeat next year.
While the pair will have plenty to discuss, from tackling immigration to fending off the populist far right, their contrasting political fortunes mean the new kid on the block may well be the one giving tips to the experienced world leader.
The new U.K. prime minister’s choice of his center-left ally in Berlin for his first bilateral visit will no doubt be a welcome distraction for Scholz as he battles domestic pressures. Starmer arrived vowing to “turn a corner on Brexit,” as the two leaders kick off talks to boost trade and defense cooperation.
But while Starmer is pitching his Labour Party’s project as a decade of renewal, polls in Germany suggest Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) is on the way out, with the right, and the far right, making up ground.
One Downing Street official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged that Starmer wants to avoid playing into the hands of the far right by repeating errors that Scholz has made.
“Delivery is absolutely paramount,” they told POLITICO. So too, the official said, is carving out a narrative “in which normal people can ‘see’ themselves and their interests represented by the government.”
Watch out for the far right — and climate
Emily Thornberry, who until the July 4 election served as shadow attorney general for England and Wales in Starmer’s shadow Cabinet and previously held the foreign beat, said that two of the biggest problems that Germany and Britain face actually overlap — climate change and far-right extremism.
“On climate change, there might be some warnings on what can happen if the leadership doesn’t get it right,” she told POLITICO, referring to electorally unpopular measures taken by Scholz’s government to tackle emissions.
“When we look at what’s happening in Germany, the lesson to learn is that the German experience shows how very difficult it is to bring a coalition together to deal with climate change … We certainly don’t want to end up with the views being as polarized as they’ve ended up being in Germany.”
Starmer may have won a massive majority, and Britain’s complex political system is set up to keep out extremists, but his team is well-attuned to the many threats facing the new government.
Starmer and Scholz will be kicking off negotiations toward a new bilateral deal hoping to boost defense and trade, and support for Ukraine’s resistance against Russia will no doubt be a key topic of discussion.
“But the context to all of it, underneath all of that, will be, how can the center left command more secure majorities, given that the story so far from Germany, from Australia, from the U.S, is that the center left can win again — but actually, that’s only half the battle,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s policy chief between 2020 and 2022, told POLITICO.
“Winning the continued support of the public whilst in power is the next campaign.”
Jokers to the right
Like Scholz’s coalition, the new Labour government faces a potent threat from the far right. The rioting targeting immigrants and people of color that blighted England and Northern Ireland earlier this month had disparate causes, and Starmer is hoping to tackle the roots of the unrest by delivering on everyday issues.
But Nigel Farage’s populist Reform U.K. party won 14 percent of the vote in the general election compared to Labour’s 34 percent, riding a wave of disgust with politics as the austerity-hit British state continues to crumble. Farage, the famed Brexiteer, is also campaigning to cancel net-zero emissions targets.
Campaigning as the widely expected victor, Starmer wasn’t the most electrifying of election candidates. He may well now want to govern with a bit more pizzazz.
Cut from similar cloth, Scholz earned himself the nickname “Scholzomat” — similar to Theresa May’s “Maybot” moniker — due to his controlled and boring style.
The sobriquet fit perfectly into the tradition of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, who was seen as an anchor of stability. Unlike the former chancellor, however, Scholz is perceived as lacking authority: In an August poll, in fact, some three in four Germans said he lacked leadership.
Scholz has also had to navigate several government crises with the potential to blow up his coalition since taking over from Merkel in 2021.
Those ranged from a bombshell ruling that blasted a €60 billion (£51 billion) hole in the country’s budget, to discord on support for Ukraine, and a surprising environmental spanner in the works: heat pumps.
How not to govern
As chronicled by POLITICO, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) weaponized the cost of the governing coalition’s plans to ban the installation of gas boilers from next year; the government ultimately watered down the legislation.
Ainsley said the environmental mess was one of multiple what-not-to-do’s that Starmer can learn from Scholz.
“The lesson that you take from that is that voters, and their cost of living, really need to be at the core of any environmental policies. In actual fact it’s going to be detrimental to send any kind of message that voters should be paying for climate policies,” she said.
“That’s why Labour have partly learned that lesson and are really putting people’s bills at the core.”
Joss Garman, another former Labour adviser, who is now the executive director of the European Climate Foundation, said Scholz’s heat pump experience “has become a textbook case study of how not to do climate policy.”
Garman added that while the UK is “in a much better place [than Germany] in terms of levels of public support” for climate measures, there’s a “risk” of far-right groups gaining traction with anti-green messaging if the government “overreaches.”
Slamming on the brakes
Another familiar subject for Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves will be Germany’s “debt brake,” which limits the amount of debt the government can take on.
Those limits are affecting Germany’s renowned infrastructure — and support for Scholz as well. Though much of the problem predates the SPD’s term in power, voters are still angry that the current government is not fulfilling some of its ambitious plans.
“So it’s that familiar story of needing and the public wanting spending on infrastructure, but there being constrained finances to do that,” Ainsley said, describing the dynamic as “a big takeaway.”
Persistent infighting, particularly between the fiscally conservative Free Democrats and their two more left-leaning coalition partners, the SPD and the Greens, have also delayed policymaking and destabilized the alliance, a problem Starmer doesn’t have after being elected in a landslide.
Voters delivered a crushing blow to the ruling German coalition in the European Parliament elections in June, handing the SPD its worst national vote result in more than a century. What’s more, in this Sunday’s critical state elections in eastern Germany, all three parties are struggling to win enough votes to reach even the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in the state parliaments.
Meanwhile, the AfD has continued to rise in the polls — from 11 percent in December 2021, when Scholz took office, to 18 percent now — and is currently Germany’s second-largest party.
Among the reasons for its popularity is its seizure of an emotional debate on migration that erupted in Germany this year in the wake of several knife attacks — a theme familiar to Starmer following misinformation about an incident in which three children were stabbed to death at a dance class in the northern town of Stockport, which provided the spark for the recent riots.
He’s running
Despite his historically low ratings, Scholz says he intends to run again for the chancellery in Germany’s national election next year. But even his own party members don’t seem thrilled at the prospect, with only one in three SPD members saying they want him to be their top candidate in a Forsa survey published in July.
A person closely connected to Labour, who was also given anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO that Starmer wants to make as much progress as possible on a proposed new security agreement with the EU under Scholz because he anticipates the task will be more difficult under a successor.
A senior aide with knowledge of Scholz’s thinking told POLITICO there was sympathy in Berlin on the need for a security deal, particularly as such an arrangement already exists between the U.K. and France, and between France and Germany.
The party most likely to assume the chancellery next year, however, is Germany’s biggest opposition force — an alliance between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister-party, the Christian Social Union — which is currently polling in first place with around 31 percent.
That’s twice as much as Scholz’s SPD, which is expected to win 15 percent. CDU boss Friedrich Merz, who is expected to be Scholz’s main opponent next year, is ideologically closer to the Tories and has praised their policies on migration — namely the failed Rwanda deportation scheme for migrants.
Next stop Paris
Despite the turmoil, Sébastien Maillard, an associate fellow at the Chatham House international affairs think tank, said it was not surprising that Starmer had chosen Berlin as the first stop on his European diplomatic mission.
In addition to the two leaders’ shared left-wing leanings, Maillard said, Germany is far more eager to welcome the U.K. back into the European fold than is a “more cautious” France, where Starmer will meet with President Emmanuel Macron after departing Berlin Wednesday.
“I think we know how much Germany was upset about Brexit from the very start, and really misses this partner … France as well, but not to the same extent,” Maillard said. “I’m sure Germany can be a good advocate within the EU of a U.K. comeback.”
Starmer may want to square some of those issues during a bilateral with Macron at the Élysée Palace on Thursday, however.
Given the electoral drubbings the French president has taken from both the left and the far right in recent months, however, Starmer could well find himself receiving tips on how not to blow it as a centrist.
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