177. Olaf Scholz: Putin, Power, and Far-Right Populism

16:59Alastair Campbell: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 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 Helmut Kohl, which up to 1998 worked. The next grand coalition to say it like this was 2005.

17:46Alastair Campbell:So it is not the natural system that the main competing parties rule together. But due to the outcome of elections, we did since then quite often, 2005 to 2009, 2013 to 2014, 2013 to 2017. and then again in 2018 after the attempt to form a government of conservatives, 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.

18:31Rory Stewart: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?

18:46Alastair Campbell:I think the biggest mistake in politics is done by Putin, who started a war against Ukraine. I'm deeply convinced today that he planned for this war two years before. 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 knew. He was discussing about the size of the Ukrainian army.

19:32Alastair Campbell:He was demanding for demilitarization, which is unacceptable, obviously. But now he has 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 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, a member of NATO.

20:21Alastair Campbell: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.

21:12Alastair Campbell: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 European 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.

21:46Olaf Scholz:It's the FSB.

21:48Rory Stewart:Please leave the building immediately. Sorry, Chancellor. Please leave the building immediately by the nearest exit. I think it's real.

22:27Olaf Scholz:Thank you for dealing with the fire alarm disturbance, which was obviously organised 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 broaden 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?

22:58Alastair Campbell:First, it is necessary to state that they have now approximately 25 % in the polls. 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. 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.

23:51Alastair Campbell:It is that they are an anti-pluralistic party. And anti-pluralistic means that they are not accepting that all of us citizens are we. So they create a sort of a we which excludes others.

24:10Olaf Scholz:But aren't you doing that by saying that they shouldn't have any position in government?

24:14Alastair Campbell: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 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.

25:05Alastair Campbell: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.

26:00Alastair Campbell:Due to some statistics, 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 that will, because of this, give the chance of being successful. And it is not problematic if there are also wealthy people all over the world and not just in North America and Europe and other places. And the second is one of the outcomes of our success when it comes to education.

26:45Alastair Campbell: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. autocracy, because it is explaining what is happening in the United States and in our countries.

27:33Olaf Scholz: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 what he's become in our politics. Just explain that.

27:53Alastair Campbell: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, 1958, and it's explaining the situation of 2033-34, so the future to come. But if you read these books, you find all the things that's 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.

28:37Alastair Campbell: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.

29:15Rory Stewart: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. 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 suggests 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.

29:53Alastair Campbell: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 welfare 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 Kass, proposed a certain tax, but just for getting jobs back, which to my mind will not work as it is thought.

30:49But in the end, it is a debate about jobs.

30:53Alastair Campbell:He is using it for pressing people in other countries to do the one or the other thing. This Orinck has never proposed, and he is 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 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.

31:35Rory Stewart: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.

31:45Alastair Campbell: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 branko 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 well 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.

32:31Alastair Campbell: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 needed 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.

33:20So in times of crisis, there's always

33:24Alastair Campbell: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.

33:54Olaf Scholz: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?

34:26Alastair Campbell: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.

34:53Olaf Scholz: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's general understanding of Germany is. But if you look at the debate on the populist 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.

35:21Alastair Campbell: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. These were the starting points, so we have different histories. But in the end, the people stay. They live with their families. They are going to school.

36:12Alastair Campbell:The children or grandchildren make great 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 moved to the United States, the today now United States.

37:21What are the policy implications of your respect?

37:26Rory Stewart: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,

38:05Alastair Campbell:I fought 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 this solution, 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.

38:59Alastair Campbell: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.

39:15Rory Stewart: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 inside Germany. I am a labor lawyer.

39:26Alastair Campbell: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.

40:21Alastair Campbell:When we had dinner the other night, you said something really interesting.

40:23Olaf Scholz: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.

40:47Alastair Campbell:Already when I became the mayor of the city of Hamburg the 198th 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 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, maybe relevant, but that it is not forever.

42:02Alastair Campbell: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.

42:18Rory Stewart: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.

42:26Alastair Campbell:The big economic rise of Germany and America, United States in the 19th century was because of the engineers and the entrepreneur working with them. Sometimes 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 built 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.

43:24And 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.

43:38Alastair Campbell: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.

43:54Rory Stewart:At the moment, Chancellor Merz and the CDU are keeping this firewall. But do you think the CDU will be able to always keep the firewall against the AfD? 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.

44:14Alastair Campbell: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.

44:44Olaf Scholz: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.

45:08Alastair Campbell:It looks like the 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.

45:44Rory Stewart: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. Instead, 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

46:21Alastair Campbell:and that if they are busy enough they will look into the details so that the bureaucrats are not alone okay listen thank you for your time thank you for dealing with the

46:34Olaf Scholz:deeply annoying fire alarm I presume there was no fire we don't know we don't know but anyway

46:38Rory Stewart:Chancellor, thank you. I'm glad we got you out of the fire. And despite Alistair, who would have tried to continue through the fire, I believe we should have left. Thank you so much. Thank you.

46:53Rory Stewart:Bloody fire alarm. Your least favourite thing, apart from people eating popcorn next to you in a cinema.

46:58Olaf Scholz:It's sort of unnecessary disruption that I can't stand.

47:01Rory Stewart:It's one of those amazing things though, as people may have picked up on the end, And it was a pretty extreme thing. These voices saying, 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.

47:16Olaf Scholz:To be fair to him, as soon as it started, he picked up his jacket and off we went.

47:22Rory Stewart:I noticed his assistant though saying to me, that doesn't sound very urgent. I was like, what are you doing? Anyway, we're back in. And firstly, he's at his strongest, I think, when he's 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.

47:44Olaf Scholz:Well, the dinner the other night, I mean, if he had a Olaf Scholz 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.

48:01Rory Stewart: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 it. Just to run through the details, the guy was the finance minister before 2014. They became completely dependent on Russian gas. He says they were trying to invest in energy and however. And then even after 2014, they did almost nothing. I mean, when he's trying to talk about what we did, it's all about what happened at 2022. No real acknowledgement, maybe because of embarrassment, that Gerhard Schröder, 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.

48:50Rory Stewart:Why do you think they can't quite bring themselves to just say, okay, yes, in retrospect, we made two or three mistakes?

48:56Olaf Scholz:Well, in further proof, Roy, that you're actually morphing from being a politician to becoming a sort of hardheaded tabloid journalist, I should explain to your 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 Mertz today, he didn't really want to criticize any of his successes, which by and large, I think is quite a good thing in a former leader.

49:34Olaf Scholz: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 survivor 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, a lot of praise for the Zeitung vendor speech and for 100 billion euros extra defence spending, whereas Angela Merkel has taken a lot of the rap.

50:15Olaf Scholz:So whether there's a bit of that, I don't know.

50:17Rory Stewart: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. 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 weapon 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.

50:51Olaf Scholz:At the dinner I mentioned on Monday, there was only about half a dozen people there. And one of them was 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. 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 his English was very, very good. Even the way when he's speaking in German, he's got this quite flat speaking style. I don't know if you noticed, he says a lot more with his eyes sometimes than he does with his words.

51:27Olaf Scholz:You can read his eyes quite. He's got amazing eye contact. I noticed 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.

51:41Rory Stewart:He decided, didn't he, to put a lot of support behind Israel?

51:43Olaf Scholz:He was behind Israel. He did go to, I think it was Jerusalem at one point, and do a press conference with Netanyahu where he was pretty, not where you and I might have been, but certainly in terms of human rights and the treatment of the Palestinians, etc. 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 Keir Starmer, his positive rating 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.

52:20Olaf Scholz:Now, again, he would have said no. And he would have then said, you 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 an interesting guy. He told me over dinner that he is writing a book. I think he'd write an interesting book. Yeah. And he actually said one of the things, he said, I'm absolutely determined to write every word myself.

52:45Rory Stewart:Yeah.

52:45Olaf Scholz:Whereas a lot of them don't.

52:47Rory Stewart:No, no, no, I'm sure it will be. I saw the charm of the man. I'm afraid that I, knowing nothing about him, had basically bought into the narrative that this was a slightly boring chancellor and a guy who had led the SPD when their polling ratings had actually dropped below the AFD and were looking pretty catastrophic. But actually, meeting him 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 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.

53:32Rory Stewart:And he definitely, although he denied this to you, was making statements about NATO, not pro-NATO, but pretty skeptical about NATO, and the journey to where he is now. And I think 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.

53:56Olaf Scholz:He was able to do the transition out of the public eye.

53:59Rory Stewart: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 patronized, condescended, pushed aside. But I'm not sure his policy solution to that is up to the problem.

54:29Olaf Scholz: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 think that this lot up here have been helping the poorer people in the global south more than they have here now what he was making the argument as well. Actually, we can lift up the global south and do it in a way that lifts us all.

55:09Olaf Scholz: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?

55:26Rory Stewart: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 anything 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 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 defecting. So maybe naively, I believe in Matt. 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.

56:03Olaf Scholz:Well, there we are. I don't know whether Gerhard Schroeder would become our third former chancellor to come on.

56:08Rory Stewart:As usual, I've screwed it. Vidae my Macron criticisms.

56:12Olaf Scholz:Yeah, well, we're still talking about that, Rory. But I'm just saying, by the way, never listen to our podcast. It's not worth listening to. I'll send you five bits,

56:21Rory Stewart:but I really wouldn't bother listening to it. Thank you very much. See you soon. Well done. Thank you.