As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz attends the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sunday, his political future will likely be decided at home in a regional election 6,000 kilometers away, APA reports citing Politico.
One more defeat at the hands of the far right this weekend will almost certainly spell the end, and Scholz could very well share the fate of U.S. President Joe Biden — thrust aside by his panicking party to make way for a candidate who can avoid a massacre in a national election next year.
Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) narrowly trails the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in polling ahead of Sunday’s election in Brandenburg, the eastern state surrounding Berlin.
If the SPD loses this traditional bastion, it will be the latest in a litany of electoral failures. The party was beaten into third place — behind the AfD — in the June European election, a stinging loss that has only been compounded by two major reversals at the ballot box in eastern Germany. On Sept. 1, the far right notched its biggest success since World War II, winning the state of Thuringia and finishing a close second in Saxony. Scholz’s SPD was crushed in both votes.
Another drubbing by the far right will only accelerate the SPD’s calculus on when to pull the ripcord. What that entails is still unclear: It could mean a snap election, or maneuvering the more popular Defense Minister Boris Pistorius into the prime electoral slot for a national vote in 2025.