The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 177. Olaf Scholz: Putin, Power, and Far-Right Populism

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Does the former German Chancellor think that Germany was wrong to rely on Russian gas in the run up to the war in Ukraine? What does Olaf Scholz think is behind the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany? Why will building respect help bring about a more equal and resilient society?  Rory and Alastair are joined by Olaf Scholz, former German chancellor, to answer all this and more.  Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith + James Clayden Producer: Alice Horrell Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Head of Politics: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And we are absolutely delighted to be with Olaf Schultz, who is a veteran German politician, who apparently first suggested to his father when he was 12. that he would one day be Chancellor. I don't remember.

Well, your father does, and he's still living. True. And the journey went via student politics, several stints as a member of the Bundestag, where he still sits, mayor of Hamburg for several years, a minister in Angela Merkel's first coalition government back in 2007.

And then by the time of her fourth government, he became vice-chancellor and finance minister, and then succeeded her as chancellor, served for a single term, pretty momentous term, all sorts of things, not least the Ukraine war, which we'll talk about, and then was replaced last year by Friedrich Meltz of the Christian Democrats. So a long, long, long career on the left of German politics and a lot to talk about. Thank you, and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Give us a little bit of a sense of your family and where Germany was at the moment where you were born.

What happened to your siblings and how that compared to your parents' lives? I was born in Osnabrück as my two brothers too, but we don't have any remembrance of this city because we left when I became three. And so I am as my parents from the city of Hamburg. In their passports, you find Altena, now Hamburg, because this is part of a process of putting some cities into the city state of Hamburg in the 30s. I grew up not in Altona where they grew up, but in the east of the city of Hamburg in one of the so-called suburbs.

And we were very proud that we were able to buy a small house. And I grew up there. What I will never forget is that in the primary school I attended, there were five classes with 35. people each class, more or less, and just seven of all of them, of all the five classes, went to the higher education school, the gymnasium in Germany. And this was possibly the first idea about there should be more justity in society. So it was a German educational system, which we sometimes look at with envy, which drew a very

clear distinction between people going to academic high schools, vocational training. But for you, from the left, you thought actually maybe this system had problems. Yes, and when I was the mayor, I changed it. I profited a lot from Social Democrats in Hamburg when we were, for a short time, an opposition party that worked on having some sort of a consensus. And the outcome was that we agreed, also with the later opposition of the Conservative Party, that we have two branches, one with this gymnasium, and the other one where you go one year longer, but you can. also get the highest degree, which was not the case before, and it was my point that this should happen, so that everyone in Hamburg, if he's going to a regular school, on a school where he could get the chance for going to university later if he or she wants. On the sort of left-right

spectrum, how left-wing were you when you were first becoming political? I was always within the Social Democratic Party, but very on the left. And what did that mean back then? Well, it was really criticizing capitalism and thinking about how we can get out of the problems caused by this. We discussed a lot of questions that were very important at that time. It was about nuclear energy and its use. We opposed it. It was about NATO? No, it was not about NATO.

It was about missiles newly established. And there were a lot of other questions that were then relevant, but it was peace movement. and the starting point of people that were criticizing climate change, but mostly the question of using nuclear power. And, Chancellor, this is the 80s. And of course, Alessa, who's a very similar generation to you, would have seen in the early 80s the Labour Party in Britain being broken apart between more left-wing groups,

more right-wing groups, and it's split in the SDP. What is your sense of how being on the left-wing of the SDP in Germany in the 80s was different from being in the left-wing? of the Labour Party in Britain. It's very difficult to understand this from Germany. And this is also due to the fact that the party system in the United Kingdom is completely different. The parliamentary faction is much more stronger, much stronger as it is in the German system

with all the parties. We were formed as parties running for seats in parliament and the party is in the end taking the decisions. And it is not as it is mostly in the conservative. party here that parliamentary faction is the center. In labor, it was always mixed due to history, but it was not like it is and wars in Germany. At that time, the Social Democratic Party had one million members, and no one was member through membership in the trade union, but only directly entering the party. Beyond that period, so you became a member of the Bundestag,

I think in 1998, so we'd been in power for a year by then. And, And when we were dealing with Gerhard Schroeder as a German chancellor and the Neuehmer Mitter, the new middle, which was seen as a parallel in some ways with New Labour, but I always sensed within the German system that there was a real kind of break on that. There was a reluctance to go as far as Schroeder maybe thought that we were going. Is that fair? At that time, I was near to the positions of Schroeder when I entered Parliament and shortly later I became the General Secretary. of the party supporting his political activities. It was a debate about how we can deal with the

questions of modernity. It was how to create growth and modernized society, which worked quite well, and which we did with a lot of attempts at that time. So there was a debate about Noemite in the Social Democratic Party, but it was not at the center of the debate. It was something that some people criticised, some others supported, but in the end it was part also of the campaign which made it successful for him to become the Chancellor. So it's tactical rather than strategic? It depends who you are. Chancellor, we also had the privilege of interviewing Angela Merkel and I guess her life experience

was quite different to yours. I mean, you could tell a story of two different Germany's through your two different childhoods and early youth. Can you explore that a bit? Talk about what we can learn from Germany comparing her 20s and early 30s and your 20s and early 30s. The West of Germany had the opportunity to gain democracy after World War II, due to the British and the Americans and France. A functioning and working democracy in a very successful economy, but it was much more complicated in the east of Germany because it was a communist dictatorship. Where Angela Merkel was growing up.

This is a great luck that we had the chance to unify again. I think many people would not have expected that this could happen at this time. Some were hoping that there will be a time where we could reach this aim, but it happened then so fast. And I'm still lucky about it. And many people in former GDR also because they gained democracy. You became a lawyer, and then a lot of your work was, with workers and trade unions and so forth.

And am I right that your subsequent direct experience of working in East Germany, in the former East Germany, perhaps brought you to a more centrist position within the left of German politics? All my time as a lawyer brought me to become a more centrist politician. Because of the reality of life, the necessity of doing pragmatic compromises with employers. I also worked for cooperatives. So I had to do a lot of, with the pragmatic labor movement, and this helped me to look different to the world.

It was very important for my career that I stopped doing politics when I left the youth section of the party quite early. To become a lawyer. To become a lawyer, more or less. Yeah. So I started in the end of my career as a politician in the youth, but I ended all the things I did in the youth organization and there were years where I had no political function and just did my job. And this was very helpful for me because there are different careers and I don't

say there's the one that is the better way to do it, but it was very helpful for me that I could change my view on things without cameras looking at my face. If you are going directly from the leadership of a youth organization as a very leftish politician in your party and then you enter parliament everyone could see how you are changing your views which obviously should happen if you are dealing with life it was easier for me because i could just do it no one was asking me why you also chancellor came into parliament relatively late i remember when i became an mp an old minister saying you must enter parliament before your third 35 if you're to have a career. And increasingly in British politics, many, many people come in quite young or have been stayed in the party movements through their 20s. They're almost professional politicians. You're quite unusual. You went to parliament for the first time when you were almost 40. So you had nearly 20 years outside.

I have to tell you that there was a small part of the big campaign of Gerruder to become the chancellor for us to lead the country saying we are advocating for 40 under 40. So there were the first 40. candidates that were not 40. I was between them because I was just 40 directly before the election. And so I could participate together with the others. Today we have luckily more young candidates for Parliament, especially in my party and in the Green Party. But this was not the case at that time. What's your assessment of Schroeder's reputation today? Insofar as he still has a reputation here, it's very much fixed, I would say, on his perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin. And I just wonder if you feel he fulfilled the evident political talent that he had. I want to be very calm, but he took decisions of private business activities that not everyone

understood. It's very difficult. I mean, I can sort of understand how he was sympathetic to Russia before 2014. What I can't understand is why he continued to be an apologist for Putin after 2014, after the Crimean invasion. Like me, no one really discussed with him, because it is his decision to go this path. We went on another path and we are going on another path, helping Ukraine to defend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. And we must be very clear what Putin did. I called a Zeitend Wende because he is going against all the agreements we had in the decades before,

that borders should not be changed by force. And that is the essential basis for peace in Europe, also in the world. And we have to stick to this. And this is why it is a correct decision that we support Ukraine. If we go back to your time as finance minister, Germany was becoming disastrously dependent on Russian energy. Were there a lot of discussions inside the government before 2014? Were you aware of the risks and the vulnerability before 2014? All the decisions of selling parts or allowing that parts of the gas storage infrastructure

was sold to a Russian company were done before I ended government. This is also true when it comes to the question of the gaspastroch, pipelines. They were already built, more or less. But there was a discussion and I started it because due to my experience as the mayor of Hamburg, I worked since a very long time for having LNG terminals in the coast areas in the ports of northern Germany. I knew all the projects that were discussed by private entrepreneur. And so when the crisis started, even before the war started, I could go back to this and ask in January 2022, before the war started, that we should look at these projects and find a way how we can import gas from other places.

But, Chancellor, the problem, of course, is clear not in 2022, but 2014 when he goes into Crimea. So how did Germany get in the position before 2014? And why was the not a more dramatic change after 2014? We all together should have done more with a stricter regime of sanctions reacting to the Crimean invasion and we can discuss why so many people thought

it's not a critical aspect to have so many gas infrastructure from Russia going to Germany. It's just more pipelines. And the second was that due a long time, even of critical moments and crises between west and east, it was never a problem with this transport of gas to Germany and to the

west. So many thought this would be always the case. You mentioned some of the differences between UK and German politics. And of course, one of the big differences is the electoral system. You go into elections basically knowing that you're going to be part of a coalition. And I just wonder what that experience is like when you're, you fight a campaign against Angela Merkel and then you end up being a deputy and then you have to work together. And whether that is ever going to be a completely fruitful relationship, to my mind, it's sort of, it's hard to understand how you even make that work. Because the analogy for a British system would be labour running against the Conservatives and then labour being up as, you know, I don't know what Edmund Byrne

becoming Cameron's deputy. But it is the typical system in most of the countries of the world. So it could also work. Just let it say like this. Yeah. I'm just interesting how that feels as a politician when you feel so passionately what you believe in and then you go into a grand coalition as the junior partner to the person who's won the election and who has some similarities of view and personality, but basically a different view of the world. So the experience of coalition governments we had in the Weimar Republic, but also in the in the new Democratic Federal Republic of Germany was easier in the beginning, especially in the Federal Republic,

since it was usually a coalition of a big and a small party. So in the case of Germany in the first years and decades, a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union and the Liberal Party. And in 1966, the first grand coalition took place in West Germany. And this was the way for the Social Democratic Party to then 1969 be successful in the election campaign. And it was important. I read a lot of texts about the debates in the parliamentary affection of the 60s. Why in 1966 we don't try to have a coalition with the Liberal Party. And one of the reasons why this did not happen was that the leadership then thought it is too early.

the people would not accept, and too many of the conservative elites would, from day one, try to spoil all the work of the government. So it was a necessary experience of public and people that they saw us in government, which has not been the case for that a long time in the Federal Republic. And then there was the coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Liberals up to 1982, and it changed again then with Thamund Cole, which up to 1998 worked. The next grand coalition, to say it like this, was 2005. So it is not the natural system that the main competing parties rule together, but due to the outcome of elections we did since them quite often, 2005-9, 2013 to 14, 2013 to 17, and then again in 2018, after the attempt to form a government of

conservative liberals and greens did not work. And we started with the next Grand Coalition where I became the vice-chancellor, as you reported. It is possible to work together, but it creates a necessity. You should not argue as a campaigner in a way that this is something you cannot imagine. You should be ready for giving the people the idea that life is full of compromises. Do you find it easier now that you're not Chancellor to talk more openly about mistakes in relationship to Russia? I mean, obviously when you were Chancellor, you were having to defend the government's record. But can you now see that mistakes were made in terms of Germany's relationship to Russia? I think the biggest mistake in politics is done by Putin,

who started a war against Ukraine. And as I think, I'm deeply convinced. today that he planned for this war two years before. And this is very important because there are so many people using, I have to say, Russian narratives about the reasons for the war that are not true. Before the war, we had talks with Putin about the question of NATO membership. And it was clear by all leaders that this will not happen very soon. And it was said publicly and behind the doors in Kiev and Moscow. So everyone knew and especially, Putin you. He was discussing about the size of Ukraine army. He was demanding for demilitarization, which is unacceptable, obviously, but now he is come to this point facing the demand that this should be an army of 800,000, which is really right the opposite of what he was asking for, and many other things. But to come back to this point, this strategy, to you Europe happens because of the imperial idea of Russia that Putin is following. And he thinks that his country should include Belarus and Ukraine.

And he wrote it on papers and said it publicly. But why was it such a surprise for you? Many were not surprised about the nature of Russian politics. So we are with good reason, member of NATO, as everyone else in NATO. We knew about the necessity of defense and about spending for defense. We have to increase. We had to increase and we are doing it. But in the end, not too many were naive about the question what Russia is looking for.

And I especially was very clear. I used also a speech in St. Petersburg to speak about it, that Russia should not look for going back to a Europe of 17th, 18th, 19th century where the big powers of Europe, Russia, England, France, and in the beginning, Prussia and Habsburg and later Germany and Austria are dealing with them. And this is not how it works. There is the European Union for most of the European states,

and there is NATO, and this will not end. And no one in the West of Europe, none of the members of NATO and of the Opin Union, not the UK is planning for going aggressively against Russia. This is not true. So he is accusing the Western states of a strategy they are not following. The FSB. Please leave the building immediately. Oh, sorry, Shantz. Please leave the building immediately by the nearest exit.

I think it's real. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung Vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer. Cancer Evolution Study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's

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Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samuick here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. and I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions,

and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say, governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975,

a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bail. out. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for dealing with the fire alarm disturbance, which was obviously organized by the Russians while we were talking about Vlad. And while we were chatting in the park near Robert Burns' statue, we were talking about Donald Trump. And I just wanted to broadly. that out to the whole thing of populism, and in particular, something else we talked about on Monday, your analysis as to why the alternative for Deutschland, the AFD, have become such a powerful force within German politics. Where do you think that's all coming from? First, it is necessary to state that they have now approximately 25% in the Polz. This is not the majority. All the other people are thinking in a completely different direction.

And this is why we agreed so far, and I hope we will continue to do so that no one will cooperate with this party. The Brandemauer, the firewall. There is a firewall, yes, but it makes sense not for keeping them small, because this is a question of political campaigning, of political debates, but to avoid that they are going to power. The most important critique I have on the AFD is not about the political position on the one or the other topic. This is open to debate in the democracy.

It is that they are an anti-pluralistic party. Anti-pluristic means that they are not accepting that all of us citizens are we. So they creates a sort of a we which excludes others. But aren't you doing that by saying that they shouldn't have any position in government? I just say that a party in a democracy must be in favor of democracy. And democracy is pluralism. And this means that you cannot get people out of the we that we are as citizens. The second is that we have a lot of doubts that if they would be able to reach

power in the one or the other way, they would use this power for not being put out of power by democratic elections later. So these are the two essential questions and all the other things we have to discuss and coming to the question why there is this rise of right populist parties we see in Germany and looking from a broader perspective of the whole world to the rich countries, why they are there in Finland, in Sweden, more or less, in Denmark, in Norway, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Austria, Germany. We see some of them in Switzerland. We see them in Italy, in Portugal, in Spain, in the United States, United Kingdom.

And we have to analyze why is this happening. I have two reasons that seem important to me. The first is the success of globalization, which many people react to with some fear about their own future or people that are like them. And we saw it since the beginning of the 80s when a lot of cheap, badly paid industrial production moved to many countries of the global south, especially, but not only China. Due to some statistic, the big majority of industrial production is now in the global south, completely different to the time before opening China in 79. And so many people think, will there be good and well-paid jobs in 10, 20, 30, 40 years? The answer we could give is yes, if we do the right things and jobs with new technologies

and that will, because of this, give the chance of being successful. It is not problematic if there are also wealthy people all over the world, not just in North of America, in Europe and other places. And the second is one of the outcomes of our success when it comes to education. We should not forget that in the 50s, just a very small portion of the population had the chance to come to the highest outcome at school and to go to university. Now this is much more people, but we are still one country and we should be. And looking down to others is the new phenomenon of the rich countries which splits our societies.

This is why I think, and I used the chance for giving a speech on this at LSE, that we could learn a lot from the book of Michael Young about the rise of the meritocracy, because it is explaining what is happening in the United States and in our countries. You mentioned this book at the dinner that we had on Monday, and you were saying it was one of the most important books you've ever read, and you actually said that I should go away and read it again, because if you don't read that book and understand it, you don't understand Nigel Farage and why he's what he's become in our politics.

Just explain that. So it is a satirical, which is written as a sociological book, which it is not. He wrote it in the year of my birth, 1998, and it's explaining the situation of 23, 34. So the future to come. But if you read this book, you find all the things that happened to us in the last decades and at this very time. And he was so good in looking into the future what might be one of the outcomes of one of the successes of our society, giving more people opportunities. My view is that if someone that is running a hospital looks down to the one that is doing the plumber's job, the society will not work. This has consequences for payment, for security, yes, but much more for the question of respect.

And if I go to a restaurant and do not think that those producing my coffee or my meal, are equals, we will not have the chance of a good society. And this has to be changed. This is my deep conviction and the most relevant questions for the United States, for the United Kingdom, for Europe and for all the rich countries of the North. Chancellor, just to develop this a bit more. So the AFD is now leading in all the East German States. But the standard of living in East Germany has increased so much since reunification. You know, it's much, much richer than someone like Hungary. In terms of the development that's happened, it's extraordinary. And yet, the German left often suggest that the reason

why people are voting for the AFD is because they are socially and economically deprived. But in fact, the statistics suggest that East Germany's progress since reunification has been unbelievably positive in terms of growth. As you have realized, I have not used this argument. We need a society of respect, and this is a cultural habit which we have to evolve, but it's also a question of how we discuss about social warfare and things like that. But the main question is that we understand us as equals, that we don't think I'm better as the other. And the second question, if this comes to it, is the question of job security

if we are looking at all the changes in the world, when it comes to technology, when it comes to globalization. If we see the politics with tariffs Trump is making, it has two aspects. The conservative think tankers, for instance, Oren Cass, proposed a certain tax, but just for getting jobs back, which, to my mind, will not work. as it is thought. But in the end, it is a debate about jobs. He is using it for pressing people in other countries to do the one or the other thing. This Orenk has never proposed and he's absolutely critical about this question. But it has to do with one aspect which is a new phenomenon in modern life that the success of economy makes it feasible that after the ending of the end of the economy makes it feasible that after the ending of colonialization in the 70s. Now we are in a phase where many of the countries of the global south will become strong, wealthy and will have a lot of production, which is good, but not everyone is sure if the outcome will be good for us also.

The risk is that the 50% who go to university think that they are better than the 50% who don't. And then you create a two-tier society that's very disturbing. Yes, and you see that there are a lot of authors now discussing the question, many of them referring to Michael Young, for instance, the tyranny of merit by Michael Sandel. We have a new book which is discussing the meritocracy trap. Branco Milanovic, a very good economist, is writing about the new elite in the United States, which is rich and having assets on the one side and on the other side. educated. If we see it in some countries like the United States, and it's also a question I think here, it is also depending on the money your parents can spend on university, which is not the case in every other country, for instance, not in Germany. But we also have

the question of dealing with the fact that we have to find a way how we unite again after the success of education campaigns in the past decades. and we will not be able to go back. It would be a big catastrophe for our economy. But if one of your friends has a son or a daughter, after a very good education at school, decides to become a baker. If this is your profession, do it.

It's a good job. For thousands of years, we need it, bakers, and we will do in the futures. And that's, I think, a problem. And we have to change this as a mood. Let me come back to the right populist in this case. They have a wrong answer, searching for enemies. So in times of crisis, there is always one that is offering this answer.

Searching for enemies in their own country, searching for enemies abroad. But solving the questions of our society has nothing to do with searching for enemies. It has something to do with being on high-level technological advancement in the society, in working for good infrastructure, for growth, which is a big question for me, and speeding up investment into infrastructure and things like that. And I agree with the whole theme of respect and a sense of equality and people treating each other as equals and so forth. But the problem at the moment is that this populist wave is led globally by Trump with a lot of outriders all around the world.

and he emanates constantly a sense of disrespect, a sense of unless you're with me, you don't matter. It's not a class thing, it's are you with me or are you against me? When I speak about respect, I speak about how we look at each other in a society. You can do it very psychologically, be always a very friendly man, be polite to others and things like that. But this is good also, but when I speak about respect, it is on the basis of how we look at each other and our professions and how we are contributing to society. We talked the other evening about immigration, and you said some very interesting things about Germany has always been a country of immigrants and perhaps a lot more than people general understanding of Germany is. But if you look at the debate on the populace right about immigrants and immigration, it is about disrespect. And that's why I think it's very hard to see how you take what you're saying in the current political climate and build it into a winning political strategy.

I'm sure that most people in our societies also here in the UK understand that nothing would work. If not, we would have had the advantage of especially work migration to our countries in the past. We have different traditions and history on migration. The British is very much influenced by the former empire, similar to France, for instance. In Germany, it was the request for labor coming from Portugal, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco in the 60s. This were the starting point, so we have different histories. But in the end, the people stay. They live with their families.

They are going to school. the children or grandchildren make great-cut careers in our society. It works. And this is why I think that the question of citizenship is essential. And there is a readiness of the most of the people to see it like I explain it here. We have the question of asylum, where we have to be ready to support people that are in danger. And especially as a German, I have to tell that we are so happy that UK, for instance, gave so many people a chance to survive the Nazi dictatorship and the fascism. And this is something we should have in mind when we look at others that are in danger. And we have to manage the question of irregular migration, which will not end as a

task for the next 20, 30, 40 years, because there is a world where so many people are today living in economic circumstances that lets them think of moving to other places, as many Europeans did when the settlers move to the United States, that today now United States. What are the policy implications of your respect? Because it's all very well saying we show respect. And you've said it's not just about politeness. But the truth of the matter is that the people working as a baker earn much less money than the people working as bankers. And there are opportunities for their voices to be heard in the media. The whole of society seems to be oriented around high incomes, high wealth, high visibility. So you can say we want to show more

respect for people in traditional blue collar jobs. But how do you make that work as a politician as a policy. Together with my party, as our sister party here in the UK, I thought very much for implementing a system of minimum wages. So this is not a very good wage, but it is much better as it was before. And I'm very much in favor of increasing it, and it was part of my last two campaigns, and we succeeded again in increasing the minimum wage in Germany, which has an impact on the whole ladder of wages for many people, because if the minimum wage rises, the others rise too. But it won't.

It is not, it is not dissolution, but it is part of it. You cannot say to someone, I respect you, and he is not able to pay for his living costs. And we should be ready, especially when we are well-paid managers, scientists, or as myself a lawyer, we should be ready to pay more when we go to a shop. You would pay more than somebody else in the shop? No, we should be ready to pay for the wages of those working there. And we should not ask to have prices that could not be managed and could not be get without too low payment for those working.

But what you will do is you will push that problem to China. I mean, they will continue to work on minimum wages and then you will feel good about yourself I am a labor lawyer. I worked in this job for 13 years before I entered Parliament in 1998, and I visited a lot of factories since then again as a mayor, as a minister, as a chancellor. I can tell you that in all the years you can always see what the increasing of productivity makes. So we have a chance for having production sites in our countries. if they are on the highest standard of productivity using news technologies,

and we should be able to have enough jobs for us in our countries. I think the whole European Union has a workforce of approximately 230 million people. If you look at China, it's much more. So having enough jobs for our people is something that is very manageable and well-paid jobs too. When we had dinner the other night, you said something really interesting, and it was the first thing you said, when I said, hello, and then I said, are you missing the job of being Chancellor? And you said, no. And you then went on to explain why actually you felt you were maybe managing post-Chancellor's life better than maybe some people that I know manage their life after power. Already when I became the mayor of the city of Hamburg, the 198 mayor of the city, state of Hamburg, and seeing all the pictures of my predecessors in dress of the Spanish court, I thought

you will be longer an ex-mayor as a mayor. Having a job should mean that you are absolutely sure that it will earlier or later end and that you will continue to have quite a proper life that if you make it good you are a person talking to others about the problems of our time but that's it I'm always looking at others and what impressed me very much was this short TV film we saw about Putin and she discussing about expanding lifetime Eternal life, yeah. This is, since thousands of years, the main question of those who are having or had relevant power, that too many of them could not imagine that they will die earlier or later as we all,

and that it is a small part of their life may be relevant, but that it is not forever. And we have to understand this as men, as human, that we are just, a short time on Earth. We were talking before we started the interview about a world run by engineers and a world run by lawyers. And some people might suggest that some of the problems that we face are the fact that all our countries are basically run by lawyers and the mentality of lawyers. The big economic rise of Germany and America, the United States in the 19th century,

was because of the engineers and the entrepreneur working with them, sometimes that. They were the same. And if we look, for instance, at China, it is today a country run by engineers with not enough rules to save people, yes. But possibly in the 60s, in North America and in Europe, the lawyers were too successful in creating procedures for investment that make it so difficult to succeed. And the people here in our country see that in other places of the world they build a whole metropolitan railway system or a whole national railway system in 20 years, whereas we built a new

railway line of 20 kilometers during this 20 years. And we should go back to the situation we had in the 60s, that there has to be the chance for controlling government decisions at court, but we have to reduce the aspects that should be controlled because we have to make it easier to have a decision on a new, let's say, street, railway, university, hospital, port, airport or so on. At the moment, Chancellor Mauts and the CDU are keeping this firewall, but do you think the CDU will be able to always keep the firewall,

against the IFDA, because there will be pressures in two years, three years, four years within that party to say, come on, if we're going to take power, we're going to have to deal with these people. I know many conservative politicians that truly hearted think they will never work together with some right-wing, right populist politicians. And if they look around, they see all conservative parties failed that went the path. So it is not a good advice to do it this way. And it's important for democracy, so I hope and I think they will not.

My last question, Rory won't be surprised to know, relates to Brexit. We're coming up to the 10th anniversary of the referendum. Your judgment of the effect of Brexit, both on the UK and on Europe, and your view as to whether you think this reset that the British government is trying to put in place can eventually lead to something akin to the kind of partnership we had before? It looks like that judgment of nearly every political party in Europe is that they will not follow the way, even the very conservative ones, not discussing leaving the Union.

Second, I think that it is up to the British to decide how they want to have their relations with the European Union, but UK can ever rely on Germany that if there is the wish for bettering the cooperation, we will be on their side. Tiny follow-up from this. Is there going to be enough imagination? I mean, one of the worries that I have is that your lawyers will get involved. Instead of politicians saying, here is a big idea. Britain, European Union, New Security.

Yeah. we will be fighting about this clause in the single market, all the civil servants and lawyers. And so is there the vision, the ambition to reimagine what Europe could be? I think that there is a vision that politicians are willing to follow that sort of vision, and that if they are busy enough, they will look into the details so that the bureaucrats are not alone. Okay, well, listen, thank you for your time. dealing with the deeply annoying fire alarm. I presume there was no fire.

We don't know. We don't know. But anyway, Chancellor, thank you. And I'm glad we got you out of the fire. And despite Alistair, who would have tried to continue through the fire, I think it's probably, I believe we should have left. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bloody fire alarm.

Your least favorite thing, apart from people eating popcorn next to you in a cinema. It's sort of unnecessary disruption. I can't stand. It's one of those amazing things, though. As people may have picked up on the end, it was a pretty exciting. extreme thing, these voices saying, meow, wow, get out of the building. And of course, everybody nowadays, instead of getting out of the building, is wandering around saying, are you sure this isn't a test? We really need to move.

To be fair to him, as soon as it started, he picked up his jacket and got out. And off we went. I noticed his assistant, though, saying to me, it doesn't sound very urgent. I was like, what are you talking? This is great. Anyway, we're back in. Firstly, he's at his strongest, I think, when he's talking. talking about ideas and books. I mean, his fluency, you picked up on the young thing and

talking about Michael Sandel, who's a Harvard professor. Well, the dinner the other night, I mean, if he had a Olaf Schultz book club, I mean, he was just reeling them out, books he'd written about the history of Britain, the Labour Party, philosophy. He's very, very, very well read. I think you're right. I think he comes to life when he's thinking about big ideas and talking about big ideas. Most listeners, and even most German listeners, will be completely depressed and astonished that he still cannot quite bring himself to admit that they totally underestimated the threat from Putin and didn't enough to protect him. Just to run through the details, right?

Guy was the finance minister before 2014. They became completely dependent on Russian gas. Yeah, he says they were trying to invest in energy in Hanover. And then even after 2014, they did almost nothing. I mean, when he's trying to talk about what we did, he's all about what happened at 2022. No real acknowledgement, maybe because of embarrassment, the Gerhard Schroeder, who had been an extremely impressive chancellor, then became an employee essentially of the Russian state oil company and a massive apologist for Putin right in the heart, never expelled from his party.

Why do you think they can't quite bring themselves to just say, okay, yes, in retrospect, we made two or three mistakes? Well, in further proof, Roy, that you're actually morphing from being a politician to becoming a sort of, you know, hard-headed tabloid journalist. I should explain to the listeners and viewers that when we went outside, you were asking him that question. Why can't you admit to a few mistakes? And the answer he gave you, I think, was essentially, well, I'm still a politician. And I guess what he's thinking is he's now out of power. I got the feeling even with Schroeder, let alone with Merkel or Merz today. He didn't really want to criticize any of his successes, which by and large, I think is quite a lot. I think he's

quite a good thing in a former leader. But I think also he might be worried, because if you remember, he's framed that part of the conversation about Ukraine, about how worried he was that so many people deploy the Kremlin narrative. And so I guess he's worrying that if we, it's kind of let Putin off the hook to say somehow, we made terrible mistakes in the preparation of this. And I guess also the kind of individual political survival. in him, is thinking, well, okay, I was the finance minister for a lot of this time, and then I was the chancellor. I actually got a lot of credit and a lot of praise for the Titan vendor speech and for

100 billion euros extra defence spending, whereas Angela Merkel has taken a lot of the rap. Yes. So whether there's a bit of that, I don't know. I mean, the result was that the question I wanted to ask was, you made this enormous speech, you committed the 100 billion, but then essentially you dragged your feet. I mean, he left in place a defence minister who, was clearly very, very uncomfortable with being proactive on Ukraine and took a long time before Pistorius was brought in. He was extremely reluctant continually on various different weapons systems,

which were always delivered six months, 12 months, too late. But of course, if I'd done that, I would have got the same shutout that I got on everything else, right? He, it was fun of at the dinner I mentioned on Monday, there was only about half a dozen people there. And one of them was kind of rather more politely making that point that you made, to which he did a big thing about how Germany is now the big spender on Ukraine. And we're the ones who are driving this. And so, yeah, I think you're right. He's a, the way that he speaks is kind of, and he was obviously, he kept asking in the breaks, you know, how's my English? And I thought he was English was very, very good. Brilliant. Even the way when he's speaking in German,

he's got this quite flat speaking style. He's, I don't know if you notice it. He says a lot more with his eyes sometimes than he does with these words. You can read his eyes, he's got amazing eye contact. I notice this at the dinner when he speaks to you, he's absolutely locked onto you. And sometimes his eyes are kind of dancing around a bit and saying different things. The two things I wanted to get stuck into, which we didn't. One was the Middle East. He decided, didn't he, to put a lot of support behind Israel. He was behind Israel. He did go to, I think it was Jerusalem at one point and do a press conference of Netanyahu where he was pretty, not where you and I might have been, but certainly in terms of, you know,

human rights and the treatment of the Palestinians, et cetera. But I think there's that. And then the second thing, which I guess relates to what's happening in UK politics at the moment, I noticed the other day, Kirstama, his positive rating at 18% or something, 18% thinking, giving me a positive, which at one point was Schultz's ratings. And I wanted to get into whether he actually ever thought, you know, the right thing might be to throw in the towel and let Boris Pistorius come in. Now, again, he would have said no.

Right. And he would have then said, you know, okay, I didn't win, but look, the SPD are in power with Mertz and Klingbell's doing a good job. And so, I don't know, I think he's, he's an interesting guy that he told me over dinner that he is he is writing a book. I think he'd write an interesting book. Yeah. And he actually said one of the things is I'm absolutely determined to write every word myself. Yeah. Whereas a lot of them don't.

No, no, no. I'm sure it will be. I saw the charm of the man. I mean, I'm afraid that I, knowing nothing about him, had basically brought into the narrative that this was a slightly boring chancellor and a guy who had led the SPD when their polling ratings that actually dropped below the AFD and were looking pretty catastrophic. But actually, meeting in person, I thought this is a highly civilized, thoughtful. I liked his reflections on his youth. I mean, it's difficult to bring out completely for an international audience what's going on in Germany in the 80s. But, you know, he is basically right out there.

He's a kind of proto-Marxist and he's meeting with these German communists and he's against American nuclear weapons. And he definitely, although he denied this to you, was making statements about NATO and not pro-NATO, but pretty skeptical about NATO. And the journey to where he is now. And I think, you know, quite a lot of people on the left that we interview, I guess, are like that. they often were much more radical in their use than when they ended up. But I thought he handled it well without losing his moral compass. It was fascinating there about the thing. He said he had a gap.

He was able to do the transition out of the public eye. But I think the respect thing is very interesting. I think it's an incredibly powerful understanding of something going wrong in our society, which is I think that's right. I think very large numbers of people in society may, as he says, their standards of living may have improved. Objectively, they may have more disposable income than their parents, but that they feel patronised, condescended, pushed aside.

But I'm not sure his policy solution to that is up to the problem. I don't think the minimum wage quite does it. But the other point he made in that debate about respect when we had dinner the other night was he was talking about the... He was saying, to understand Trump's rise, you have to understand the north versus the south in terms of the globe, not just rich people, poor people, elite working class in our societies, but actually the sense that those poorer people in our societies,

basically the thing that this lot up here have been helping the poorer people in the global south more than they have here. And what he was making the argument is where actually we can lift up the global south and do it in a way that lifts us all. And that's, I think, where he worries about where the politics are right now. My final point, what did you think about his argument on the Brandtmauer in this sense that whatever happens, however they poll, we and the CDU and the FDP, we should have absolutely nothing to do with the FD? It strikes me that we are very, very lucky actually to have Friedrich Metz being so clear and strong as a conservative saying, I'm not going to have me to do with the far right. because the electoral mathematics, once you've got 25% of people voting for the far right,

the temptation, and look, look at the temptation, the Conservative Party will be feeling with reform when they go into the next election, there'll be people pushing for an electoral attack there. They'll be all defecting. So maybe naively, I believe in Mance, I think so long as he's there, he'll hold that line. I'm much less confident that his successor will find it as easy to hold the line. Well, there we are. I don't know whether Goerhout Schroeder would become our third former chancellor to come on. As usual, I've screwed it.

Vide my Macron criticisms. Yeah, well, we're still talking about that, Rory. But, you know, I'm just saying, by the way, don't never listen to our podcast. It's not worth listening to you. I'll send you by bits, but I really wouldn't bother listening to it. Thank you very much. See you soon. Well then.