If German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were a football manager, he’d be sacked by now. Under his watch, Germany has become the worst-performing major economy. His approval ratings are dire, and only a third of his own party say they want him to lead them into the next election. Yet Scholz is determined to seek a second term next year, no matter the costs.

The German Chancellor seemed to be entirely unperturbed by the mood in his party and in the country as he held the last press conference before the summer break on Wednesday. Appearing without a tie and with the top button of his shirt undone, he smiled throughout and was visibly determined to appear relaxed.

When a reporter asked if he’d follow US President Joe Biden’s lead and step aside for the 2025 election, he replied with his trademark sarcasm by thanking them for the “incredibly kind and friendly question”. Once the laughter in the room had subsided, he declared that his Social Democrats were “a very united party. We’re all determined to campaign together in the federal elections and win. As chancellor, I will run for re-election.”

Many of his fellow Social Democrats will find the situation less amusing. In the EU elections in June, the centre-left party got just 14% of the vote, putting them in third place behind the centre-right Christian Democrats and the far-Right Alternative für Deutschland. Polls are predicting similar results for a federal election.

If nothing changes and the SPD gets something around the 15% mark next year, it would be a historic low for the party. Excluding the Nazi era, when the party was banned, you’d have to go back to 1887, when the movement was still in its infancy, to find a worse result.

In the 2021 election, the SPD had won by a whisker, getting 25.7% of the vote and beating the Christian Democrats by 1.6%. The latter had run without Merkel for the first time in 16 years and fielded the deeply unpopular Armin Laschet. Scholz had been Vice Chancellor in Merkel’s coalition government and ran the campaign as the continuity candidate, even imitating Merkel’s trademark hand gesture.

Scholz cannot pull off the same trick again. Voters will judge him by his own legacy. They now also live in a world that is no longer the same. Wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, the rising costs of living, Germany’s sluggish economy, high immigration, a worrying amount of political violence and unreliable infrastructure are just some of the problems on people’s minds. Polling shows that two-thirds of Germans now think their country is on a downhill trajectory. Promising people more of the same won’t cut it this time.

It is clear that Scholz has lost the confidence of his party and the German people. In light of the rise of the AfD, he often urges voters to “elect democratic parties and not the Right-wingers”. But how can that ever be a credible proposition when he himself doesn’t respect the fundamental principle of democracy — that those in power rule with the consent of the majority?

It’s difficult to see how Scholz’s appeal to the SPD to unite behind an unpopular leader serves anyone but himself. Neither country nor party stand to gain from offering the electorate a candidate that is currently judged to do a bad job by two-thirds of the public.

If Scholz isn’t concerned by what his intransigence might do to trust in the very principle of democracy, perhaps the party will spend some time over the summer to let the implications sink in. Scholz may not be a football manager, but that doesn’t mean he is unsackable.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.

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