German leader says it is time to ‘get out of this war situation’ as new poll ranks him the most unpopular chancellor in decades
IN BERLIN
8 September 2024
Olaf Scholz urged on Sunday that peace in Ukraine be achieved “more quickly” as he faces mounting pressure at home to bring about an end to the war.
The conflict started by Russia in 2022 has entered its third year, giving rise to a weariness over the continued cost it is causing the government and public.
The far-Right AfD and far-Left BSW parties – which both want to end weapons deliveries to Ukraine – made huge gains in two regional elections in Germany last week, while Mr Scholz’s coalition parties received a bruising.
“I believe that now is the time to discuss how we can get out of this war situation and achieve peace more quickly,” Mr Scholz told ZDF, the public broadcaster, in an annual summer interview.
Mr Scholz made the comments as a new poll by ARD DeutschlandTrend ranked him the most unpopular chancellor for almost 30 years.
It found that only 16 per cent of Germans were satisfied with his fractious traffic light coalition, which succeeded Angela Merkel’s government in 2021, and only 18 per cent approved of Mr Scholz personally. They are the lowest approval scores since 1997, when Helmut Kohl was leader.
Among the reasons for voters deserting Mr Scholz for the far Right are perceptions that he is weak on migration and too supportive of Ukraine.
Germany is the second-largest contributor of aid to Ukraine after the United States.
Mr Scholz said Russia should attend the next international peace summit on ending the war, after Moscow had been excluded from the first one.
“It’s important that we make progress,” Mr Scholz said. “There will definitely be another peace conference,” he said, “and the [Ukrainian] president and I agree that it must include Russia.”
‘Meaningful results’
Leaders and top officials from more than 90 states gathered in Switzerland in June for the first summit organised by Ukraine, while Russia had not been invited.
Kyiv is aiming for a second peace summit this year, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said in late July that Russia should be present in order to achieve “meaningful results”.
Despite his weak polling numbers, Mr Scholz has vowed to seek re-election.
“I firmly expect that the SPD [Social Democratic Party] and I will have such a strong mandate in 2025 that we will also lead the next government,” Mr Scholz told Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.
The massive mafia propaganda campaign is working in Germany, as it’s working elsewhere too. Scholz and all the rest of the Western leaders are at fault for the ignorance of their people about this war and the ensuing unpopularity. We can’t forget the media, too, who fail miserably in this regard. In Germany, you can hear maybe 10 reports on the Gaza war to every 1 report about Ukraine. And the war in Ukraine is RIGHT NEXT DOOR there!
If Western leaders had wanted to, this war could already be over, and they could concentrate on other pressing matters. They could also be using mafia money to finance Ukraine’s war and economy.
But, Western leaders choose not to provoke and to protect the wealthy. Then they can’t blame but themselves for being unpopular, even with both sides.
A reverse takeover from the east seems to be in progress. See my comment below about Peter Hitchens.
Scholz is caught in a pincer movement from resurgent putlerist parties. Germans don’t like him much; they like putler more.
Far right putler-rimmer Peter Hitchens has just endorsed Germany’s far left putlerist:
“Why clever Sahra could go far”
“I can’t count the number of times various editors sent me rushing off to Germany to report on the latest wave of neo-Nazism. None of them came to anything, because, actually, most Germans don’t really want to be Nazis.
But the British obsession with the possible return of Hitlerism is also blinding us to the most significant new political leader in Europe. She is Sahra Wagenknecht, an elegant, clever, half-Iranian Leftie.
Her party, the BSW, is modestly named after her and did strikingly well in last week’s elections in Thuringia. I think she may go far, and suspect this will be a good thing. Her childhood in Communist East Germany (which thought itself so perfect that it made little effort to combat bigotry) was stained with racial insults. So she has no time for race hate of any kind. But she has urged her former far-Left comrades to stop being so silly about the large votes for the dubious AfD party – which undoubtedly contains some unpleasant types.
She has told them: ‘People don’t vote for the AfD because they are fascists. They vote for it because they are angry.’
They are angry about uncontrolled immigration. But they are also angry about Green lunacy, and about their government’s strange self-destructive part in the war with Ukraine. The whole country is impoverished by its boycott of Russian energy. Its government is silent about the destruction of a large part of its national property, the Nordstream pipeline – presumably for fear that it was done by one of its major allies. And for what? Who needs this war?”
Hitchens has been putting out anti-Ukraine propaganda for more than 15 years. In 2010, he visited Crimea, interviewed a putinaZi admiral and a couple of putinaZi chicks in a bar in Sevastopol.
He described Ukraine as a “fanciful country.”
Fucking bastard.
Sara is just another pimple on putin’s ass. She won’t get very far in Germany, politically speaking.