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In three weeks, the Merkel era of German politics will come to an end. The West’s longest-serving leader remains popular: over 16 years in office, Angela Merkel’s ratings have never slipped

below 50 per cent. But the German Chancellor is quitting while she is still ahead — and not a moment too soon. She leaves a country that looks likely to reject her party and much of her

legacy. If, as polls predict, the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPD) replace their Christian Democratic (CDU) coalition partners to become the dominant force in the next German government,

the impact will be felt across Europe. The man tipped to succeed Mrs Merkel is Olaf Scholz, who is the SPD’s choice to be Chancellor, but not its party leader. (It is a peculiarity of German

politics that voters dislike too much power being concentrated in one person, so state and party responsibilities are often split.) As Finance Minister, Scholz has served alongside Mrs

Merkel and is widely seen as the continuity candidate. He is only too happy to encourage this perception of a pragmatic technocrat whose competence compensates for what he lacks in charisma.

His election slogan is _Scholz packt das an_ (“Scholz will sort it”), strikingly reminiscent of Mrs Merkel’s famous phrase, _Wir schaffen das _(“We can do it”), made in 2015 when Germany

faced a sudden influx of migrants. It is galling for the Chancellor’s chosen successor, Armin Laschet, that the German public regards him as less worthy to inherit her mantle than his rival.

Laschet has fought a feeble campaign that has cruelly exposed his lack of experience at national and international level: though he has run the large state of North Rhine-Westphalia, he has

never served in the Federal Government. If Scholz has made a virtue of seeming ordinary, Laschet comes across as merely provincial. In an interview for _The Times _(behind a paywall),

Laschet’s chief supporter, the Health Minister Jens Spahn, warns that Scholz is a “figleaf” for the hard Left: “This isn’t Angela Merkel in male form: it’s someone who didn’t even become

leader of his own party. Behind him are hiding all that crowd with the old ideas: higher taxes, more taxes, extra constraints on freedom. That’s all pretty 1970s stuff.” It’s significant

that Spahn rather than Laschet is speaking to the foreign press: the former, unlike the latter, speaks excellent English. Indeed, many Christian Democrats must now regret choosing Laschet

rather than the younger, more cosmopolitan and more dynamic Spahn, who has guided Germany through the pandemic. But the Health Minister is also the country’s leading gay politician: backing

him to replace the socially conservative Mrs Merkel was a step too far for the Christian Democratic establishment. But Spahn may also have got it wrong by assuming that all Germans share his

distaste for the 1970s — a decade he is too young to remember and the last to be dominated by the Social Democrats. Most older Germans have fond memories of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt,

the SPD Chancellors of those years, who seemed a breath of fresh air after an era dominated by the Nazi past and the Cold War. The social reforms and _Ostpolitik _they pioneered were not

extreme and were later adopted by their opponent, Helmut Kohl. Unlike Britain, then seen as “the sick man of Europe”, Germany overcame its crises at home and abroad. As a critique of German

Social Democracy, “Back to the Seventies” is more likely to evoke nostalgia than nausea. The present-day party that was actually born during that period, the Greens, had a golden opportunity

to emerge from this month’s election as the largest party. But their would-be Chancellor, Annalena Baerbock, appears to have blown her chances by a series of unforced errors that have cast

doubt on her trustworthiness. In the first of three televised debates, Ms Baerbock and Laschet tore strips off one another, while Scholz rose above the fray, looking statesmanlike. His

personal ratings have soared as Laschet’s have slumped, while the SPD has opened up a five-point lead over its rivals. With postal ballots already being cast, it’s looking very late in the

day for either the CDU or the Greens to stage a comeback. Barring an upset, it is almost certain that the SPD and Greens will form a coalition — but they will need a third party. The main

issue now is whether they will get enough votes between them to be able to choose between a more centrist coalition with the Free Democrats — who would seek to curtail any radical tendencies

— or a more Left-wing government with the former Communists of _Die Linke _(“The Left”). It is the latter possibility that is the last hope of the Christian Democrats, who are belatedly

promising to be tough on China and offering to pay their dues to Nato. Having conspicuously failed to do either over 16 years in office, the CDU’s credibility is limited. But fears of a

lurch to the Left could play into the hands of Scholz himself, who is much more of a Tony Blair than a Jeremy Corbyn. As a canny Finance Minister who promises to balance the books and grow

the economy to protect Germany’s generous welfare and pension system, he would welcome a pro-business coalition partner — rather than the hardliners of Die Linke who hanker for the

full-blown socialism of the old East Germany. Fortunately for Scholz, the electoral arithmetic looks likely to give him what he wants. As the polls stand, Die Linke is languishing on 7 per

cent: barely enough to surmount the 5 per cent minimum to get into the Bundestag and certainly insufficient to push an SPD-Green coalition over the 50 per cent they need to govern

effectively. So the likely outcome is a “traffic light” coalition of SPD, FDP and Greens (so-called because their colours are red, yellow and green respectively), a combination that has

already governed several states but not yet at federal level. Because such a coalition would span an unusually broad ideological spectrum, it would certainly require months of negotiations.

While the three parties wrangle over policies and portfolios, the expectation is that Angela Merkel will be prevailed on to remain in office as a caretaker Chancellor. So we may not see much

visible change in Germany before the New Year. Even so, this is a dramatic moment for Europe’s largest economy — and it should matter more to British politics and the media than it has done

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