50 Time May 9/May 16, 2022
Three days afTer russia ordered
troops into Ukraine, German Chancel-
lor Olaf Scholz stood before the Bundes-
tag, the federal Parliament in Berlin,
and addressed the lawmakers in a spe-
cial Sunday session. “Feb. 24, 2022,
marks a watershed moment in the his-
tory of our continent,” he said, calling
the Russian invasion a Zeitenwende, an
epoch-changing event.
Scholz, who had taken office only
a couple of months earlier, met this
historic moment with a response
that would overturn decades of mili-
tary policy —and with it, a crucial part
of postwar German identity. He an-
nounced a €100 billion plan to boost the
country’s notoriously depleted armed
forces, promised to end reliance on Rus-
sian fossil fuels, and, for the first time
since the Second World War, declared
Germany would send weapons to a con-
flict zone. “The issue at the heart of this
is whether power is allowed to prevail
over the law,” Scholz told his Parlia-
ment, “or whether we have it in us to
set limits on warmongers like Putin.”
Exactly what those limits should
be—and how quickly Germany should
impose them—has been the subject of
fierce debate in the two months since.
For decades, Germany has been an eco-
nomic powerhouse with a military that
lagged behind, embracing pacifism in
atonement for the Holocaust and other
devastations it caused in the 20th cen-
tury. With his Zeitenwende speech,
Scholz presented a road map for Ger-
many to emerge as a true global power—
with a military to match. “We have to
be strong enough. Not so strong that
we’re a danger to our neighbors,” Scholz
says, during an April 22 interview with
TIME, his first with a major English-
language publication since the start of
the war. “But strong enough.”
The announcement of this new era
for Germany was met warmly by allies
around the world, many of whom had
complained about Germany’s hesi-
tancy in the run-up to the invasion.
And though the speech raised ques-
tions at home, the three parties in his
coalition quickly swung into line, as did
the broader public: a March 1 poll for
the broadcaster RTL found that 78%
of Germans supported Scholz’s plan
to send weapons to Ukraine and fund
improvements to the German army.
“It was a really great moment,” Marie-
Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the
Bundes tag Defense Committee, says of
the speech. “And then it went quiet.”
Quiet is Scholz’s hallmark trait. A re-
served man who, as his biographer Lars
Haider puts it, “deliberately does not
answer questions directly,” Scholz has
yet to find his political rise impeded by
his apparent reluctance to explain him-
self. But in this moment of historic cri-
sis, when the future not just of Ukraine
but of the entire European order hangs
in the balance, his subsequent reticence
has inflamed critics at home and abroad,
turning the expectations raised by the
Zeitenwende speech to widespread
frustration.
When it comes to military and finan-
cial aid, the international perception
has been that Europe’s largest econ-
omy is shirking its responsibilities at a
time when smaller nations, from Poland
to Estonia, are stepping up to provide
hefty donations of money and weapons.
It was only on April 26, after weeks of
conflicting deflections, that Scholz an-
swered Ukraine’s pleas and agreed to
send heavy weapons directly.
And then there is the matter of im-
ported Russian oil and gas. Not even the
killing of hundreds of civilians in Bucha
or the brutal siege of Mariupol—which
Scholz calls “immoral crimes”—have
persuaded the Chancellor to implement
an immediate embargo on Russian fos-
sil fuels.
Now that Gepard tanks will be roll-
ing across Ukraine—a rare delivery of
heavy weapons systems from a West-
ern nation’s own stockpile—the deci-
sion is being cast by many as the Chan-
cellor caving to criticism from allies.
But when he spoke with TIME four
days earlier, Scholz seemed immune to
pressure, calmly maintaining insteadthat he was committed to the promises
of the Zeitenwende speech, was work-
ing as fast as possible in tandem with
Germany’s allies—and trying to avoid a
dangerous escalation in hostilities.
In his view, he has been entrusted
by the German people to lead based on
what he believes—and not what polls
say—is right for the country. “If you are
a good leader,” Scholz says, “you listen
to the people, but you never think they
really want you to do exactly what they
propose.”On the winter day in 2021 that
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16 years in
power came to an end and Scholz took
office, his father told a reporter that his
son was just 12 years old when he de-
clared he wanted to become Chancellor.
It’s not hard to believe; Scholz joined
the center-left Social Democratic Party
(SPD) while he was still in high school.
After practicing law for several years, he
entered the Bundes tag in 1998 and soon