Who is really Olaf Scholz, the winner of the elections in Germany, the only possible candidate for the German chancellery? Who is the politician who revived the dying SPD, leading it to a success that is as surprising as it is unexpected? He is a labor lawyer, who when he smiles looks like a child in an adult face, a man capable of inspiring sympathy but without a shred of charisma, a mild and resolute competitor in regaining a disaffected and critical electorate, but given up for a loser.

It is no mystery that most considered the race to the chancellery a losing game and that Olaf Scholz, the outgoing finance minister of the Grosse Koalition (a crucial role in this time of pandemic and in the start of the EU Next Generation), would have same fate reserved for candidates Peer Steinbrueck and Martin Schulz. In the last two rounds of elections, the candidacy for the German chancellery had become a sort of gallows on which the SPD, for some time in a profound identity crisis, sacrificed its leaders from time to time. The premises for hypothesizing a defeat were all there: the quiet and a little gray Scholz did not like the party base that had already humiliated him when two years ago, at the end of the Congress in 2019, he was a candidate, as a favorite, for the party secretariat. But the majority, critical of the Grosse Koalition, had preferred the duo formed by the unknown Norbert Water-Borjans and Saskia Esken to the faithful militant, who had joined the party since the age of 17. Which is now obviously the victory of the SPD. For Scholz and the moderates of the SPD, the defeat had been a very bitter morsel.

But even on that occasion Scholz did not cause scandals, sure that his art of working hard but under the radar, without fuss, mediating, would sooner or later lead to a good result. This time he did more. He managed to appear to a good chunk of the German electorate as the only credible heir of Angela Merkel, annihilating the CDU candidate, Armin Laschet, in every confrontation. And there is a sentence that sums up the character well. Those who reproached Scholz for the monotonous tone, without enthusiasm, so little empathic, were heard replied: "I am running for chancellor, not for director of the circus." Serious, almost Zen, he was known by the nickname of "Scholzomat", for the sleepy and almost robotic chant with which twenty years ago he defended the unpopular reforms of Gerhard Schröder (those that allowed Germany to face, twenty years later, the crisis on a sound basis).