Managing the Legacy of Long-Term Leaders: The Curious Evolution of Leadership Styles in the German Chancellery

ABSTRACT

Long-term leaders tend to cast long shadows that give their successors a hard time. This article puts forward an argument that assesses the nature of those challenges and the different ways of dealing with them, with a focus on incumbents’ leadership styles. At its core, the article looks into the historical evolution of the German chancellorship, which has been marked by three extended incumbencies (Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel). The key focus of this comparative assessment is, however, on their strikingly different successors – Ludwig Erhard, Gerhard Schröder and Olaf Scholz. While Erhard and Schröder tried to break free from their predecessors’ legacy, Olaf Scholz went out of his way to present himself as ‘another Merkel’, if more in terms of leadership style than policy. The three case studies suggest that successions tend to involve a strategic element, yet incoming leaders are not entirely free to invent a role for themselves. While they face particular expectations, they have to remain true to their personality and adopt a leadership style that does not damage their authenticity. This is a formidable task, as their predecessors’ legacies that shape their own perceived performance are not static but evolve over time.

Introduction

Among the many contextual variables that shape a leader’s opportunities and performance, the way he or she comes to office and the leadership record of the departing leader hold a special place. However, while there is a longstanding tradition to distinguish leaders winning office in the wake of a landslide election victory from those coming to power through other channels, the central role of departing leaders in the transition process and its aftermath has long been ignored. One of the most basic, yet crucial, features of a leader is his or her length of tenure. Long-term leaders, which are defined here as incumbents holding office for more than 10 years¹, are not only generally perceived as more eminent and successful than their short-term counterparts, both in presence and in retrospective (see e.g. Strangio, ‘t Hart, and Walter 2013). They have also been identified as particularly ‘hard acts to follow’ (Horiuchi, Laing, and Hart 2015; see also Helms 2020a). That is, long-term leaders, by their very nature, tend to place a particular burden on the shoulders of their respective direct successors, though it has remained curiously understudied why exactly this is so.

This article seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the politics of succession in contexts defined by the presence of long-term political leaders. It does so by focusing on ‘the leadership styles, and political skills of incumbent and aspiring leaders (that) make up an important part of (any) succession puzzle’ (Bynander and ‘t Hart 2006, 708). Whereas leadership style is understood here as ‘the characteristic ways in which a political leader deals with recurring tasks of leadership such as persuasion, the management of conflict, and administration’ (Hargrove 1993, 75), skill is considered to refer to ‘the degree of virtuosity with which those tasks are accomplished’ (Hargrove 1993, 75). Following in the tradition of the major works by Hargrove (1993), Hermann (2005), Greenstein (2009) and others, we consider leadership style to largely flow from, and reflect, a leader’s personality. While certain skills can be developed and improved, by gaining experience or training, the overall style reflecting the deep-seated personality traits of a leader is much less likely to change. It has been shown to be largely stable even when actors take on different institutional positions or roles (see Cuhadar et al. 2017). However, it is important to note that the key dependent variable of this inquiry is not leadership style as such, but the nature of the succession to a long-term leader and its aftermath, which is strongly shaped by outgoing and incoming leaders’ styles.

There are few established democracies that provide better opportunities for developing a comparative perspective on successors to long-term leaders in the political executive than the Federal Republic of Germany. This is true in particular if one looks for democratic regimes marked by politically and institutionally stable conditions, which have been highlighted by Bynander and ‘t Hart (2006, 708) as the two crucial elements shaping the politics of succession, alongside the wider historical context. Germany is indeed a special case of a fully consolidated democracy with a track record of three exceptionally extended tenures in its top political leadership office. Konrad Adenauer (1949–63), Helmut Kohl (1982–1998) and Angela Merkel (2005–2021) all held the German chancellorship for more than 12 years and up to 16 years respectively. With the close of the Merkel era in 2021, Germany has not only hosted three long-term chancellors, but also witnessed the arrival of their immediate successors in the chancellery: Ludwig Erhard (CDU, 1963–66), Gerhard Schröder (SPD, 1998-2005), and Olaf Scholz (since 2021). Thus, the Federal Republic offers itself as an exemplary comparative case study illustrating and substantiating our theoretical contentions to be sketched below in the context of real-world post-war democracy, though the insights gained are not limited to a deeper understanding of the politics of leadership successions in Germany alone.

The next section develops the central argument, which considers both the nature of long-term leaders’ legacies and the challenges and choices their successors tend to face. We then move on to substantiate these assumptions in the context of selected chapters of German contemporary political history. As we seek to demonstrate, all other differences apart, one fundamental difference at the level of successors stands out: while Erhard and Schröder tried to break free from their predecessor’s legacy and redefine the German chancellorship, especially in terms of leadership style, Olaf Scholz went out of his way to present himself as the natural successor and closest equivalent to Angela Merkel, if arguably more in terms of self-presentation and style than substance. Methodologically, the three case studies are based on an extensive analysis of media coverage and political science and contemporary history literatures. The concluding section connects the German experience to the wider literature on the politics of leadership successions, which has emerged as a key subject in the comparative study of executive and party politics.

Long-Term Leaders’ Legacies, and Their Successors’ Ambitions and Choices

Long-term leaders tend to leave heavy legacies, which can to a large extent be considered a direct result of their extended presence at the centre of decision-making.² Regarding the legacies of political leaders, Fong, Malhotra, and Margalit (2017; 2019) distinguish between hard and soft legacies. While the first dimension denotes the public policies of a government (‘the concrete and enduring policy achievements’), the second one refers to the ‘memories enshrined in the public’s consciousness’ (Fong, Malhotra, and Margalit 2017, 1). As to possible hard legacies, everything else being the same, long-term leaders face unusually favourable conditions of leaving a substantive legacy, i.e. a sizeable number of major policy decisions and policies, simply because they have more time than others to build such a legacy.

In several ways, the category of soft legacies marks the more slippery dimension of political legacies. The leadership style of office-holders can be conceived of as a soft legacy; it tends to become an element of ‘the past in the present’ (Farrall, Hay, and Gray 2020, 1) as soon as – if not even before – a leader leaves the stage. As Bynander and ‘t Hart emphasise, ‘the leadership style of an incumbent, especially a long-serving one, constitutes a reference point for anyone’ (Bynander and ‘t Hart 2006, 208). Importantly, not only leadership styles that have been perceived and assessed as positive by peers and the wider public tend to become part of a leader’s soft legacy. Indeed, even if citizens have eventually grown tired of a long-term leader, and want change, his or her leadership style is likely to linger on, shaping the future standards of what is widely considered ‘normal’ in a given country, and thus also the leverage of newly incoming leaders. Some of the most impressive evidence comes from German political history. As Clay Clemens has suggested, Helmut Kohl’s tenure as German chancellor from 1982 to 1998, which continues to present one of the longest tenures in recent European history, ‘changed public expectations of government. In his first years, he did not fit the voters’ image of an ideal chancellor: most still pictured Adenauer or Schmidt, men deemed to have more policy expertise. However, by the mid-1990s many Germans had grown used to Kohl’s style, for many the only one they remembered’ (Clemens 1998, 13). The politically devasting experience of French President François Hollande, who tried to be a ‘normal president’ after President Sarkozy's ‘hyper presidency’ comes as an awkward reminder that even leadership styles that a society explicitly wants to leave behind can haunt a successor. Used to Sarkozy’s hyper-active and notoriously aggressive leadership style, many French citizens increasingly considered Hollande, whom they had bestowed with a victory over Sarkozy in the presidential election of 2012, more of a ‘wimp’ or a ‘bore’ than a welcome ‘healer’ and responsible leader (see Gaffney 2015). Just a few years later, Hollande became the first president of the Fifth Republic to renounce his bid for a re-election.

The second premise constituting our argument concerns the selection strategies of political parties as the central gatekeepers to executive office in parliamentary democracies, and their crucial importance as central governing agencies which require the constant attention of executive leaders. Parties want top candidates that help them to win (and keep) office, allowing them to implement their policies. While parties generally control the candidate selection process, they are less free than widely suggested when it comes to picking their lead candidate for the country’s political job at the top. Specifically, the public popularity of individual candidates cannot normally be ignored. This has always been true, yet the recent international trend towards more intra-party democracy, including the structural widening of the selectorate for party leader contests, has further limited rather than expanded the parties’ potential for carefully controlled ‘strategic selections’. As LeDuc noted in his classic article, ‘In an earlier time, parties guarded the right to select their leaders closely (…). As the pressures for greater democratisation of internal party politics build, parties run the risk of losing control of their own leadership selection mechanisms’ (LeDuc 2001, 338; see also Cross 2013). But even parties operating elitist, rather than inclusive, selection regimes cannot easily ignore candidates enjoying great popularity with the wider public (that is, beyond the party’s core clientele). While in most established parliamentary democracies, party evaluations continue to be overall more important for voters’ choice than leader assessments, there has been a strong trend towards ‘personalisation’ of politics to be accounted for, including ‘electoral personalisation’ (see Garzia, Ferreira da Silva, and De Angelis 2022; Quinlan and McAllister 2022).

Even the most popular leaders cannot afford to ignore party matters while governing, however. This is particularly true whenever executive leaders chair coalition governments, which is the norm rather than the exception across Western Europe and in many other parts of the democratic world. Under that condition, the task of intra-party management is complemented by that of coalition management. Coalition governance and management are complex matters both in empirical and conceptual terms (see Bergman, Bäck, and Hellström 2021; Strøm, Müller, and Bergman 2008), and many aspects affect the head of government directly (Vercesi 2016, 182). Generally, coalition parties tend to have a much more conditional willingness to keep the head of government politically unscathed at any expense; they have to be kept in line all along the way. Thus, among the many qualities needed to perform successfully at the head of a coalition government, managing the complex relations between parties that to some extent compete with each other even while governing together with reasonable skill, is an indispensable element. Indeed, the different approaches to coalition management, and the types of coalitions themselves, can be considered a core factor defining the overall performance of any political leader operating in the context of a coalition democracy.

The third element informing our argument concerns the general ambition of newly incoming leaders to leave their own mark in terms of both policy and politics, which implies stepping out of the long shadows of their long-term predecessors. Generally, both executive leaders and their principals – i.e. in all genuine party government regimes, their parties – have a committed interest in using successions to break free from the past and turn over a new page. While this ambition can be considered stronger if a leadership succession includes a change in party control of the office, scattered evidence suggests that the general assumption largely holds for ‘takeover leaders’, including the rarer species of ‘heirs apparent’, that succeed a long-term leader from their own party in the midst of a legislative term, too (see Helms 2020a; Worthy 2016).³ And this is no coincidence. Indeed, many intra-party successors coming to office without an electoral mandate are brought to power by their parties with the explicit strategic aim to dispel growing public discontent with the status quo and restore authority; they seek to present fresh faces as a functional equivalent to a genuine alternation in power in terms of change of party control (Green and Jennings 2017, chapters 5 & 6). Thus, both out of intrinsic motivations and strategic political considerations, leaders succeeding long-term office-holders from the same party have good reason to present, and to think of, themselves as genuinely new – just as incoming leaders succeeding leaders from a different party do.⁴

However, when the natural ambition of political leaders ‘to do it their way’ and leave their mark on their country’s political history meet specific challenges – such as having to manage long-term leaders’ legacies – successions may still play out differently in political reality. Some leaders may actually seek to embody continuity rather than change, if this appears as the more, if not the only, feasible way to win and keep office. Importantly, rather than resulting from any sophisticated strategic choice, this is more likely to reflect a lack of any credible alternative. While the authority of a political leader to make decisions, including tough and unpopular decisions, is dynamic and subject to change over time (see Bennister, Worthy, and Hart 2017), the political personality of a leader and his or her leadership style reflecting this personality are not (see e.g. Hermann 2005; Mondak 2010). Thus, if a candidate or leader happens to share many perceived features of his or her predecessor’s personality and style, he or she may find it difficult, if not impossible, to credibly emphasise his or her ‘otherness’. Largely following in the predecessor’s steps may be the only viable option when it comes to safeguarding his or her authenticity.⁵ Most candidates work on their image as they turn from challenger to incumbent in an attempt to adapt to altered expectations and demands, thereby seeking to enhance their authority (see e.g. Klormann and Udelhoven 2008). However, images are only credible, and thus politically useful, as long as they do not call into question or undermine a leader’s perceived authenticity.

The next section of this article offers a sketch of two cases (Erhard and Schröder) that are, for all the differences separating them, largely in line with the standard expectations sketched out above, and another one (Scholz) that marks a noteworthy deviant case. The latter can be explained, or so we shall argue, by Scholz’s successful attempt to use the unique leadership vacancy of 2021⁶ for turning his experience as senior government minister and deputy chancellor and, no less importantly, his personal limitations as a candidate into a promise of continuity (if less so in terms of policy than with regard to leadership style). For the benefit of the largest possible analytical rigour, we provide a systematic rather than a strictly chronologically organised assessment looking at the political fortunes of Erhard, Schröder and Scholz with a focus on selected aspects shaping the politics of succession.

Managing the Legacies of Long-Term Chancellors

From Candidate to Chancellor

Regarding their way of becoming their party’s chief candidate for the chancellorship, Erhard, Schröder and Scholz’s trajectories are all very much in line with the selection logics suggested above. Specifically, notwithstanding the major differences in their overall public popularity⁷, all were clearly the most popular candidates that their respective parties had to offer in 1963, 1998 and 2021. It was this (relative) public popularity that let them appear as their parties’ ‘natural choices’, largely irrespective of (the absence of) other qualifications that would be considered a sine qua non in many other countries. Indeed, neither Erhard nor Schröder and Scholz were their party’s leader when winning the chancellorship in the first place.

Picking the most popular candidate, disregarding other aspects such as the party leadership question, has been an easier decision to make for German parties after the ‘invention’ of the distinctive position of ‘chancellor candidate’ in the early 1960s. By convention, chancellor candidates may, but do not have to, be party leader; many have been minister-president instead (see Helms 2020b).⁸ Both Schröder in 1998 and Scholz in 2021 served as chancellor candidates in a Bundestag election supported by SPD party leaders firmly located to their left. The same was true for Helmut Schmidt as the SPD’s incumbent chancellor candidate seeking re-election in 1976 and 1980. Scholz’s position was unique, however, not only because the office of chancellor was vacant, with no incumbent seeking re-election (see note 6 above), but also because he was the first chancellor candidate to face two serious contenders (see Dostal 2021; Faas and Klingelhöfer 2022; Helms 2021; Niclauss 2022). Following a whole series of missteps by his two competitors Annalena Baerbock (Green) and Armin Laschet (CDU; see Olesen 2024), Scholz strongly benefited from increasingly being perceived as ‘the least unsuitable’ candidate (see Helms 2022, 78–80; Klein, Springer, and Kühling 2022). Less than a week after the election, however, Scholz emerged as the generally preferred candidate, leading Laschet by a huge margin (76 per cent to 13 per cent; see Forschungsgruppe Wahlen 2021).⁹

During the election campaign, Scholz’s attempt to drive in Merkel’s slipstream was very apparent throughout. Scholz tried to present himself to the electorate as the best of two-worlds: as chief protagonist of a moderate policy-turn to the left, and the guarantor of continuity in terms of a ‘familiar’ leadership style. He did not even shy away from having himself pictured on a magazine’s cover with Merkel’s famous hand gesture, the so-called ‘Merkel-Raute’. The very possibility of this strategy hinged on the fact that the 2021 Bundestag election campaign was played out against the unique scenario of a ‘lame-duck chancellorship’ (Helms 2023, 106–107), with a chancellor not running for re-election while still enjoying high scores of public popularity. This provided Scholz with the opportunity to frame his bid for the chancellorship as a discreet offer to fill an emotional vacuum¹⁰, and exploit Merkel’s continued popularity to his advantage. Indeed, as Reinermann et al. (2023) demonstrate, voters are strongly influenced by past political judgments and evaluations, including ‘evaluations of incumbents who do not run anymore’ (Reinermann et al. 2023, 9). While Armin Laschet, in his role as CDU/CSU chancellor candidate, benefitted most directly from Merkel’s popularity, ‘Merkel’s popularity was … not exclusively helping the CDU/CSU’ (Reinermann et al. 2023, 9; italics added).

Again, this exceptional mimicry exercise – brandished by Markus Söder, the Minister-president of Bavaria, as an unheard-of case of ‘political legacy theft’¹¹ – would not have been possible under ‘normal’ conditions, i.e. with a sitting chancellor seeking re-election (or electoral confirmation in office, for that matter). But beyond this, Merkel contributed her share to an opportunity structure, in which Scholz’s party label did not seem to matter as much as it otherwise could have by slowly but surely transforming the CDU, making it step by step more liberal or ‘social democratic’ as many felt (see Dürr 2021).¹² Alongside his status as ‘vice chancellor’ – which was owed to the ‘grand coalition’ format of the Merkel IV government (2017-2021)¹³ – the maintenance of Scholz’s ‘quasi-technocrat’ image was also facilitated by the fact that he was the SPD’s chancellor candidate but not SPD party leader.

While sharing the feature of ‘non-party leader chancellor candidate’ with Scholz, Schröder’s position was still markedly different. Rather than being offered the chancellor candidacy on a silver tablet arranged by an increasingly desperate SPD party leadership, Schröder won his candidacy against his close intra-party competitor Oskar Lafontaine, then Minister-president of Saarland and, more importantly, incumbent SPD party leader. His political ordeal became the state election in Lower-Saxony on 1 March 1998, which Schröder won by a landslide, securing another absolute majority for his government, thereby crushing Lafontaine’s ambitions for the chancellor candidacy. In stark contrast to Scholz (and most other recent SPD chancellor candidates), Schröder could appear almost ‘brutally strong’, and fiercely committed to putting the long Kohl years to a sweeping end by winning the chancellorship. Thus, it was no coincidence that at some stage Schröder’s campaign team found it expedient to launch the reassuring message that they ‘did want to change everything, but do many things better’ (see Helms 2016, 297).

Though reaching out for the chancellorship as the ‘vice chancellor’ of the previous government, just as Scholz did nearly 60 years later, Erhard’s case was very different from both Schröder’s and Scholz’s: For one thing, Erhard may be considered the classic case of a ‘takeover leader’ succeeding a departing chancellor from the same party in the midst of a legislative term. On 23 April 1963, i.e. about six months ahead of the chancellor election in the Bundestag on 17 October the same year, the CDU/CSU parliamentary party group elected Erhard – against Adenauer’s explicit reservations – with 159 against 47 votes (and 19 abstentions) as their official candidate to succeed Adenauer in the chancellery. However, the ‘intra-party’ feature was not perfectly clear in Erhard’s case. Erhard eventually took over the position of CDU party leader from Adenauer in March 1966, but there were rumours that he formally joined the CDU only then, i.e. more than two-and-a-half years into his chancellorship and just about six months before losing it. According to some sources Erhard was never a formal member of the CDU.¹⁴

Parameters of Coalition Governance

Both Schröder and Scholz assumed the chancellorship in the aftermath of a Bundestag election which had made the SPD the largest party in parliament, and triggered a change of party control of the chancellery (from CDU/CSU to SPD). More than that, in both cases their government represented genuinely new coalition types – the first ‘Red-Green’ coalition (SPD-Green) in Schröder’s case, and the first ‘traffic light’-coalition (SPD-Green-FDP) in Scholz’s case, which replaced a CDU/CSU-FDP government (led by Helmut Kohl) and a CDU/CSU-SPD government (led by Angela Merkel), respectively. In that regard, the events of both 1998 and 2021 clearly pointed towards change rather than continuity. The ideological framing of the ‘Red-Green project’ of the 1990s (see Egle, Ostheim, and Zohlnhöfer 2013) was considerably more consistent than that of the three-party coalition forged in late 2021, though Schröder in his role as SPD chancellor candidate and main challenger to Chancellor Kohl never fully subscribed to considering an SPD-Green government the only conceivable option.

Importantly, the result of the 1998 Bundestag election also triggered the first, and to date only, ‘wholesale alternation’ of governing parties at the federal level, providing the Red-Green project with a unique electoral boost. Schröder’s status as a potential ‘game changer’ was further underscored by the fact that the new governing parties also controlled the Bundesrat (if just for a few months, until the state election in Hesse early in 1999), which has been unusual for SPD-led federal governments, including the Scholz government when taking office in December 2021. Finally, regarding the 1998 and 2021 chancellor elections in the Bundestag, considered by many as an important indicator of the amount of support a newly incoming chancellor can expect from within the government’s parliamentary majority for the early stages of his or her chancellorship, Schröder was in a better position than Scholz, too. Indeed, in 1998, Schröder was the only candidate ever to receive more votes than the coalition parties had seats, though with just slightly less than 95 per cent Scholz’s score in 2021 was fine as well.¹⁵

By that measure, the challenges of coalition governance and management, to be faced by Chancellor Scholz, exceeded widespread concerns. The challenges at play cannot be captured fully by looking at the programmatic and/or ideological distances of the three parties only, which were obviously very considerable from the beginning. Both junior partners of the SPD, the FDP and the Greens, displayed behavioural features of longstanding opposition parties which only incrementally got re-accustomed to the governing mode. In particular the FDP long seemed to consider themselves as a kind of ‘intra-governmental opposition player’. Thus, overall, the coalition-related dimensions of Scholz’s early chancellorship seemed to point, even more so than in Schröder’s case, towards major change.

By contrast, both in terms of the government format and the party complexion of the government, Erhard’s chancellorship clearly seemed to favour continuity rather than change. Erhard had not just been a senior minister in any of the various Adenauer governments since 1949; he was also firmly tied to the ‘conservative’ climate of the 1950s, putting a premium on security and stability rather than innovation and change. Further, Erhard ‘inherited’ the last Adenauer government supported by the CDU/CSU and FDP, and the transition in October 1963 was limited to less than a handful of ministerial turnovers.

However, the inside story of the change from Adenauer to Erhard in the chancellery was different, in fact anything else but firmly committed to ‘more of the same’: The FDP had had major reservations about Adenauer ever since re-joining the federal government in 1961 as the CDU/CSU’s junior partner. In fact, the Liberals had joined the final Adenauer government in 1961 only on the condition – formally acknowledged in section A1 of the Federal Republic’s first ever written coalition agreement – that Adenauer, being notoriously reluctant to leave, was not to stay on until the end of the legislative term. Thus, a new beginning under a different chancellor – in terms of executive leadership, rather than policy – was strongly favoured by the Christian Democrats’ junior coalition partner as well as many in the CDU itself who had become increasingly alienated from Adenauer.

Unsurprisingly, then, with 90.5 per cent of the coalition parties’ share, Erhard’s performance in the chancellor election in the Bundestag on 17 October 1963 was better than Adenauer’s in 1961 (83.4 per cent), but still marking the fourth worst score recorded at the 24 chancellor elections taking place between 1949 and 2021¹⁶ (see Helms 2022, 66, Tab. 2.4). Given the nearly one-third of members of the CDU/CSU parliamentary party group in the Bundestag, that had withheld support for Erhard in the nomination vote in April 1963 (see above), it seems safe to assume that most non-supporters were Christian Democrats rather than Liberals, (further) limiting Erhard’s party-based political capital from the very beginning.

Personality and Leadership Style

Both Ludwig Erhard and Gerhard Schröder were fundamentally different political personalities and types of leaders than their respective predecessors, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. And indeed – despite their different ways of coming to office, and the different parameters of the party system of their time – both came to signal a clear departure from their predecessors’ styles. However, rather than reflecting any clear-cut strategic choice to be possibly modified at will, both largely stuck to roles that matched their personalities and skills, and could be performed credibly without putting their authenticity on the line. That Erhard’s and Schröder’s attempts to do things their way were very differently perceived by the media and the wider public – Schröder as a sleek and refreshing ‘alpha leader’, Erhard as an overdue replacement not up to his predecessor’s standards – was very much owed to the overall public climate of their times. While by 1998 Kohl had very much become a ‘political dinosaur’ whose time was widely perceived to be up, Adenauer’s leadership performance continued to dominate public notions of effective leadership well beyond the end of Erhard’s chancellorship. A closer look at Erhard and Schröder’s leadership style reveals that they had rather different features, but also shared some with each other.

Erhard never had Adenauer’s policy expertise nor his personal stamina to follow in his steps. Politically even more important, he lacked the political resources to enforce his will on the party and government – provided he ever really wanted to. Rather than being constrained by Adenauer’s continued role as CDU party leader, Erhard was not really interested in any kind of party politics at all (as his cultivated non-partisan status indicated early on). In contrast to Adenauer, whose leadership regime was of a distinctly partisan nature, including an advanced level of polarisation between government and opposition, Erhard rather aspired to become a ‘people’s chancellor’, operating above the partisan fray, and trying to draw authority from his status as a university professor (see Koerfer 1987). Erhard’s weaker grip on ‘his’ government can to some considerable extent also be explained by the comparatively poor performance of the Federal Chancellor’s Office, whose evolution in the early aftermath of the Adenauer era has been described as a rare case of ‘institutional degeneration’ (Müller-Rommel 1994, 115). For some scholars, the main problem, however, was that Erhard had no real preferences, let alone convictions, in many if not most policy areas. From that perspective, the much-noted losing of the reins in the cabinet, with individual ministers rather than the chancellor taking the lead on most issues, thereby giving rise to a genuinely collegial atmosphere, seems to have been chiefly caused by a lack of policy competence (see Hentschel 1996, 534), rather than the spread of a carefully crafted new ‘leadership philosophy’.

Notwithstanding his ‘technocratic’, non-political approach, Erhard seemed to be well aware that political ideas and decisions required a distinct communication effort to create legitimacy – which marked another difference to Adenauer who had a legendary preference for ‘solitary decision-making’, taking tacit agreement and widespread public support for granted. However, while Erhard was very much of a ‘media star’ during the earlier stages of his political career, his communication skills as chancellor were notably inefficient and disappointing (see Abelshauser 2017). The frustrations of Erhard’s media advisers who tried desperately, and in vain, to fit the chancellor – a corpulent Franconian economics professor in his late 60s – with a vigorous ‘James Bond image’ (see Schmidt 2020, 110) came as a powerful reminder that projected images have to fit the inner and outer dimensions of a given personality to come to fruition in political reality. In the end it was for everybody clear to see that Erhard, even if he possibly would have wanted to, was neither Konrad Adenauer nor James Bond (notwithstanding some conspicuous attempts in the more recent literature to portrait Erhard as a genuine ‘hero’ of German post-war political development; see Mierzejewski 2005).

Importantly, Erhard’s different way of leading (or on many occasions, non-leading) was thrown into relief by Adenauer’s continued presence as an elder statesman constantly hackling from the sidelines (see ‘t Hart 2007). By outlining the limitations of Erhard’s leadership capacities, which implied the necessity and superiority of a more power-concentrating hands-on approach, Adenauer played a key role in perpetuating the standards of how effective leadership was supposed to look like well beyond his own tenure. It that regard at least, Adenauer cast considerably longer shadows than either Kohl and Merkel later on, thereby actively contributing to Erhard’s intrinsic commitment to leaving the Adenauer years behind.

In retrospective, the Kohl years were marked more by a particular leadership style than by a distinct policy profile of the various Christian-Liberal governments. While there was no ‘Kohlism’ in terms of a distinct set of public policies (with the possible exception of European integration; see Wewer 1998), an unprecedented level of ‘informal party governance’ emerged early on as a defining feature of Kohl’s chancellorship (see Helms 2005; 2016; Korte 1998). At the height of the Kohl era, virtually all major decisions were made by the ‘coalition round’ (a handpicked gathering of party figures chaired by the chancellor in his role as longstanding CDU party leader) rather than by the cabinet.

The early steps of the Schröder government included an explicit commitment to avoiding such ‘party state’ mechanisms that had been harshly criticised for their lack of transparency and questionable legitimacy even by steadfast supporters of a CDU-led government. In fact, turning away from Kohl’s distinctive leadership style became a major asset for Schröder and the new government – all the more so after ex-chancellor Kohl became the chief protagonist in the CDU party finance scandal of 1999, which centred on Kohl’s unwillingness to disclose the names of several secret donors.¹⁷ However, ultimately, the Schröder government’s track record in terms of ‘informal governance’ was only slightly less advanced than Kohl’s, if of a different nature. While Kohl’s regime rested on informal intra-party and coalition management, Schröder’s (while also operating a ‘coalition committee’) was chiefly marked by the extensive use of commissions. Thus, while the Kohl system involved powerful party and parliamentary players at the expense of government ministers, Schröder’s system enhanced the status of selected interest groups to the detriment of parliamentary government (see Helms 2005; Stüwe 2006).

In other areas, Schröder’s departure from the standards of the Kohl era were more clear-cut and pronounced: Kohl loved to describe himself as ‘Adenauer’s grandson’, which seemed justified both with regard to his European commitment and no less so regarding the extremely close integration of the roles of CDU party leader and chancellor. By contrast, Schröder shared with Erhard a ‘populist’ vision of the chancellorship. Like Erhard, Schröder assumed the party leadership only reluctantly and after winning the chancellorship in the first place. Perhaps even more remarkable was his decision to resign from the SPD party leadership again 18 months before the early Bundestag election of 2005, marking the end of his chancellorship¹⁸, which underscored the fundamentally different leadership approaches of Schröder and Kohl. While Kohl essentially governed through his party, Schröder rather tried to keep the party at bay, or outrightly circumvent it whenever considered politically expedient.

Beyond the areas of coalition and party management, political communication became a key distinction between Kohl and Schröder: Kohl proved not just a notably poor public speaker on many occasions. His minimalist and low-risk public leadership approach was closely related to his inclination to ‘sit things out’, i.e. moderating protracted negotiations behind closed doors until a viable consensus emerged, rather than publicly taking the lead on contested issues. By stark contrast, Schröder apparently enjoyed publicly framing selected issues as ‘Chefsache’, to be sorted out by him personally, which given the strong institutional constraints against majoritarian rule that marks the German post-war polity more often than not turned out to be an empty promise. Still, very much unlike Kohl, Schröder has until today remained the epitome of a ‘media chancellor’ willing and able ‘to govern with the media’ (see Boberg, Hase, and Johnson 2016; Meng 2002).

In terms of leadership style, and the more particular question of continuity and change concerning the departing long-term leader’s style, Scholz strongly differed from both Erhard and Schröder and their approach to dealing with their predecessor’s record and legacy. For a distant observer, the change from Merkel to Scholz in late 2021 may seem to have provided all it takes to mark a genuinely fresh start at the level of Germany’s executive leadership. Not only represented Scholz ‘the other major party’ (a notion that has obviously become contested in recent years, as the Greens emerged as a third major player recurrently leading the SPD in opinion polls in the run-up to the 2021 federal election); he also led a genuinely new coalition (see above). Even before the government had really taken over, Scholz hailed the exceptional potential and long-term agenda of this three-party-alliance, underscoring the definitive political farewell to the long years of ‘Merkel rule’, and Christian Democratic dominance. This possible impression was fuelled, even terminologically, by Scholz’s ‘Zeitenwende’ speech before the Bundestag on 27 February 2022, referring to the global implications of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and Germany’s fundamentally altered self-perception in European security policy (see Langenbacher 2022).

A strictly policy-focused comparative assessment of Merkel and Scholz would seem likely to reach the conclusion that most fields were marked by a mix of continuity and change, rather than radical U-turns, though in some important areas real change was tangible. This applied in particular to European Union policy. While Merkel was very active on the EU stage, Scholz seemed to be more interested in China. Some policy changes Scholz initiated as chancellor looked even more dramatic because in his role as finance minister in the last Merkel government (2017-2021) he had been pushing in the opposite direction. This is true for his 100 million Euros pledge for the Bundeswehr made on 24 February 2022, and his former explicit veto against Defence Minister von der Leyen’s effort to increase the defence budget in order to move closer to the NATO target of 2 per cent of GDP, and to overcome the Bundeswehr’s problems caused by a heavily dysfunctional procurement regime.

However, Scholz’s leadership style was undeniably marked by a striking similarity with Merkel’s, as has been widely noted even well before the transition of 2021. As leading figures in the CDU/CSU-SPD government from 2017-2021, Merkel and Scholz shared an established reputation for being exceptionally down-to-earth and well prepared when entering complex policy discussions, attaching great importance to discretion and being at their best when operating in small circles (see Bahnsen 2018). Against this background, it came as a surprise when Scholz announced in an interview in late 2021 that he would seek to establish a different leadership or governing style as chancellor – with cabinet meetings starting later to have more room for preparatory talks beyond the agenda, and regular consultations with citizens over important pending policy decisions (Tagesspiegel, 1 December 2021).

While some settings within the governing machine, such as the relationship between the chancellor and senior advisers in the chancellery, seem to have been altered, with Scholz reportedly preferring shorter meetings than Merkel, and one-on-one (The Economist. 5 April 2023), the observable features of Scholz’s leadership style clearly continued to display strong parallels with Merkel’s. To some considerable extent, this was due to the conspicuous non-delivery of some of the proudly announced innovations, and departures from Merkel’s way of governing, such as connecting more often, and more directly, with the wider public. While Scholz did make a slightly greater effort to connect with citizens than Merkel used to, this has largely concerned targeted and controlled encounters, and few if any spontaneous contacts (Kinkarts and Thurau 2024). The farmer protests in early 2024 became a showcase of Scholz’s explicit refusal to have an open public exchange with a crowd of protesters.

More specifically, Scholz very much continued Merkel’s communication style, which had gained the latter the accusation of operating a regime of ‘silent paternalism’ (Kurbjuweit 2011; see Schomburg, Mykhalchyshyn, and Herber 2016, 280–296) – taking even big and contested decisions without ever explaining or justifying them. Those who believed that Merkel’s legendary terseness and restraint could not easily be matched, let alone surpassed, by any future chancellor, were proven wrong. Indeed, observers considered Scholz to set genuinely new standards of speechlessness. When Scholz spoke in public, often too little and too late, he did so in an erringly unemotional way, fully living up to his nick-name ‘Scholz-o-mat’. On other occasions, both political actors and the public at large waited desperately, and often in vain, for any authoritative position-taking of the chancellor (see e.g. Marguier 2023).

That Scholz was just as self-confident and unexcited as Merkel, and adopted a strikingly similar communication style, did not disguise other differences. Merkel tended to communicate poorly, but was very much in control behind the scenes. Precisely this could not be said to be true for Scholz. Public disagreement between the coalition parties reached unprecedented levels during the Scholz chancellorship (even when accounting for the unusually complex format of this coalition, and the wealth of different challenges plaguing the government). Too often, Scholz looked like a bystander rather than a chief executive. When he intervened, he often did so too late, as such as with the government's heating law in 2023, which then had to be put together in a rush, and eventually provoked opposition from the constitutional court. When Scholz, rarely enough, tried to take the lead, such as when making use of his ‘Richtlinienkompetenz’ to bring about a decision on the phasing out of nuclear power in October 2022, it left him with less, rather than more, authority – again very much unlike Merkel, when pointing to her ‘Richtlinienkompetenz’ in an argument with Interior Minister Seehofer over how to deal with asylum-seekers (Der Spiegel, 18 June 2019).

Still, overall, it is no coincidence that interim assessments of Scholz’s leadership performance ironically praised Scholz as ‘the better Merkel’ (Handelsblatt, 18 March 2022) – an assessment that was not to last, however. After the first year of the Scholz government, an absolute majority of respondents (and even a slight majority of SPD supporters, 39:37) considered Merkel the better chancellor (Tagesspiegel, 7 December 2022). It did not come as a surprise when it became known that, even a full year into his chancellorship, one of Scholz’s key advisers was in fact Angela Merkel (Der Spiegel, 12 November 2022).

On a more general scale, scholarly observers were right to point out that Scholz's ‘leadership capital’ (understood as a combination of skills, relations and reputation; see Bennister, Worthy, and Hart 2017) did not develop much over his first year in the chancellery (see Glaab 2022). More than that, it quickly diminished as his chancellorship wore on. In November 2023, an INSA public opinion survey made headlines that reported Scholz to be the most unpopular chancellor on the survey company’s record (Bild, 28 November 2023). In a public opinion survey by the same institute published early in 2024 more than 64 per cent of the respondents preferred Defence Minister Boris Pistorius over Scholz as chancellor, and were in favour of seeing a replacement happen before the end of the regular legislative term in late 2025 (Bild, 8 January 2024). Ironically, Pistorius had joined the cabinet as a replacement for Christine Lamprecht only in January 2023. It marked Scholz's going back on a core promise from the election campaign and the post-election aftermath to chair only a government featuring a perfectly equal share of male and female ministers (which he did until this reshuffle).

The more interesting thing about Scholz's rapid decline of leadership capital, and in particular public trust, concerns its striking correlation with the evolving legacy of Angela Merkel: While Merkel enjoyed a notably high reputation beyond the end of her chancellorship, the domestic and international developments of 2022 and 2023 had a strong negative impact on her public standing, and thus her ‘soft legacy’. As one observer noted, ‘Many Germans have now come to the conclusion that Merkel’s chancellorship was not the success it seemed to be. Many blame her and her style of politics for the dire situation in which Germany finds itself today, particularly when it comes to the energy crisis. (…) Merkel’s Covid policy, with its months’ long lockdowns and school closures, is also coming under considerable fire in retrospect. (…) Now that the curtain has been pulled back on the failures of Merkel’s technocratic style of politics, we shouldn’t be surprised by the sinking levels of trust in her successor. After all, despite belonging to a different political party, Scholz has long presented himself as Merkel 2.0’ (Beppler-Spahl 2023). This episode demonstrates that legacies, and especially soft legacies, are by their very nature dynamic and subject to change, and that there is no ‘all-weather’ strategy for managing complex legacies sucessfully. Successors rise or fall depending on the changing public perceptions of the legacies they inherit, on how they positioned themselves in the first place, and on the extent to which they are able to adapt to changing perceptions. At different stages of his career, Olaf Scholz came to experience the best and the worst effects of (all too) readily embracing his predecessor’s perceived legacy.

Discussion and Conclusion

Political successions matter. While being, by definition, a transistory phenomemon, successions are nonetheless a key to any deeper understanding of politics and leadership in different regimes. This article has focused on the performance of three German chancellors operating in the face of their long-term predecessors’ legacies. While the first two successions (Adenauer to Erhard, and Kohl to Schröder) were marked by sweeping change in terms of leadership style, the most recent one (Merkel to Scholz) displayed a striking amount of continuity. Especially our third case study suggests that legacies, or public perceptions thereof, can change over time, with major implications for those having to deal and live with them.

What all three cases suggest is that there are tight limits to strategically staged successions. Leaders are not free to adapt to the difficult task of dealing with their predecessor’s legacy at will, or at least not without possibly damaging their authenticity and credibility. Erhard and Schröder could not, even if they would have wanted to, become a second Adenauer or second Kohl, given their fundamentally different personality, image and skills, just as Scholz could not have made a radical departure from Merkel’s leadership approach. Counterfactual thinking suggests that Schröder would have performed differently as Merkel’s successor than Scholz did, just as Scholz can be assumed to have acted very similarly had he been Kohl’s rather than Merkel’s successor. Whenever Scholz tried to act like Schröder (which many observers soon came to consider his only chance to rebuild his dwindling authority; see e.g. Reitz 2023), it only underscored the fundamental difference between the Federal Republic’s third and fourth Social Democratic chancellor. Scholz’s rather unfavourable performance when visiting flooded areas in late 2023 and early 2024 to assess the scene and meet affected local residents, as Schröder did back in 2002, provides a glaring case in point (see e.g. Sommer 2024).

The overarching goal of this article has been to advance the study of political successions in established parliamentary democracies with a focus on the distinct challenges that departing long-term leaders leave for their successors. While Germany has been Western Europe’s hub of long-term leaders for many years, cases from other countries can be found (including Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair; Spain’s Felipe González Márquez, Austria’s Bruno Kreisky, or Luxemburg’s Jean-Claude Juncker). If the conceptualisation of long-term leaders were to be amended to include leaders with a six to eight years-long tenure, which is still exceptional considering the much lower duration of many European prime ministers (see Müller-Rommel, Vercesi, and Berz 2022, 57, Tab. 2.9), the number of relevant cases could be significantly increased, and future research in this field greatly empowered and enriched.

It is hoped that this study will inspire other scholars to continue the comparative politics of political successions powerfully (re)launched by Bynander, ‘t Hart, Uhr and others a few years ago¹⁹, beyond the subject of long-term leaders and their legacies and successors. There are other types or categories of leaders that would seem to deserve special attention thanks to their complex, and often ambiguous, legacies. Arguably the most fascinating species are right-wing populist leaders, many of whom tend to weaken not only their own parties (see Alexiadou and O'Malley 2022; Kostadinova and Levitt 2014), but also undermine state capacity, in particular impartial state administration (see Li and Wright 2023). No less importantly, most of those leaders have generated high levels of ‘pernicious polarisation’ and created deeply divided societies (McCoy and Somer 2019). The cases of Biden in the US and Lula in Brazil, who governed in the face of the Trump and Bolsonaro legacies, demonstrate that making a new start is possible, yet it remains for future research to establish what difference government types (presidential, parliamentary, and semi-presidential), and other contextual variables, make for managing difficult transitions and legacies. A politically more disturbing incidence must be seen in the fact that, when eventually stepping down, many of the most prominent contemporary right-wing populist leaders – from Hungary’s Orbán and Turkey’s Erdogan to India’s Modi – will also have been long-term leaders by any standard, leaving particularly heavy toxic legacies to both their successors and societies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I feel deeply indebted to the anonymous referees and the editors of this journal, especially Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, for their constructive feedback and generous support. The usual disclaimer applies.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ludger Helms

Ludger Helms is a Professor of Political Science and Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Innsbruck. His research interests focus on comparative political institutions, contemporary political history, and executive politics and elites. He has published widely in those fields.

Notes

1 We do so in line with Horiuchi et al.’s observation that ‘it may take a decade or more of a particular (…) leader to reign before he/she starts to become a kind of iconic benchmark that complicates the life of a successor’ (Horiuchi, Laing, and Hart 2015, 363).

2 The case could be made that long-term leaders are, by definition, more resourceful actors, with independent effects of major and lasting legacies. However, party government regimes, in which parties and stable governing coalitions can hold even leaders in power that would fail to secure a direct election victory, long-term incumbencies do not necessarily indicate a leader’s predominance across different arenas (party, electoral, parliamentary, and executive).

3 Indeed, both John Major, following Margaret Thatcher in 1990, and Gordon Brown, following Tony Blair in 2009 went out of their way to establish a markedly different style – to name just the two most obvious and well-known cases from the history of prime ministerial leadership and succession politics in the UK.

4 Other things being equal, this is likely to concern issues of style more than policy issues, as parties holding on to power tend to continue to be committed to their election pledges even in the face of a mid-term leadership change (see Naurin and Thomson 2020; Thomson et al. 2017).

5 As the comparative empirical assessment by Stiers et al. (2021) suggests, authenticity – understood to incorporate desirable attributes such as honesty, consistency and others – ‘coheres conceptually and empirically as a trait, an important trait that adds to understanding politicians’ popularity—as leaders, and at the ballot box’ (Stiers et al. 2021, 1201).

6 Having come under increasing pressure early in her fourth and final term, Angela Merkel had stepped down as CDU party leader in late 2018 and announced her resignation as chancellor by the end of the current legislative term (i.e. by late 2021); see also note 11.

7 Erhard had been significantly more popular with the wider German public than Schröder and Scholz both before becoming chancellor and during the early stages of his chancellorship.

8 Unlike the CDU/CSU, the SPD has had a long tradition of separating the roles of party leader and chancellor candidate, mainly because traditionally leftist party leaders (such as Oskar Lafontaine and Saskia Esken in Schröder's and Scholz’s case) were considered unable to appeal to a wider German electorate.

9 Still, it is important to note that in 2021, as at earlier Bundestag elections, party evaluations outweighed leader evaluations and leader popularity in shaping the vote (see Dentler, Blinzler, and Quinlan 2024).

10 On the more general issue of emotions in shaping perceptions of Angela Merkel as chancellor see Masch and Gabriel (2020).

11 If this political agitation is taken seriously, it would have to be added that Merkel herself conspicuously tolerated the ‘hijacking’ of their legacy. First, she long failed to groom a successor. Further, when her apparently preferred successor as CDU party leader (and supposedly next chancellor), Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, resigned as CDU party in February 2020 after just 14 months in office, Merkel seemed to have lost any interest in the political fight for her succession and legacy. Specifically, she was reported not to have backed the chancellor candidature of Armin Laschet in the final vote of the CDU bodies on their candidate (Der Spiegel, 23 April 2021).

12 Perhaps closer to the truth, as Streeck suggests, Merkel ‘had no ideological prejudices whatsoever – no need, no taste, no instinct for ideology, and no sense of what it might be, or might once have been, good for’ (Streeck 2021, 5). In any case, very much in line with her apparent distance from her party throughout her chancellorship, and highly unusual for a longstanding former CDU party leader, Merkel left the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which has close ties to her party, late in 2023.

13 At the federal level, grand coalitions have remained a relative rarity in German post-war politics, in operation for 15 out of the past 74 years (1949–2023), though in fact three out of the four Merkel governments were grand coalition governments.

14 See Die Welt, 25 April 2007. Importantly, Erhard had tried to avoid becoming Adenauer’s successor as CDU party leader until the very end. He had put in place CDU party manager Josef-Hermann Dufhues to compete with Adenauer’s preferred candidate, Interior Minister Paul Lücke. But a few weeks ahead of the vote Dufhues withdrew ‘for personal reasons’, and left Erhard with no other option than to seek the party leadership.

15 For a comparative analysis of all chancellor elections in Bundestag, 1949 through 2021, see Helms (2022, 64–66).

16 Including Kohl’s successful constructive vote of no-confidence against Schmidt in 1982.

17 This scandal did not only discredit Kohl as a public figure personally but retrospectively also de-legitimized his heavily informal leadership style as chancellor, which was then increasingly seen as the breeding ground for problematic forms of ‘informal governance’ (see Clemens 2000; Helms 2000).

18 The ‘official narrative’ of this episode tried to describe this crucial turning point as a carefully designed power-sharing-arrangement that would allow Schröder to fully concentrate on his primary tasks as chancellor. Ironically, or perhaps paradoxically, Schröder was never held in higher esteem by his own party than at the very end of his chancellorship, mainly thanks to his uncompromising Bundestag election campaign of 2005.

19 See, e.g., Bynander and ‘t Hart 2006; ‘t Hart and Uhr 2011; Horiuchi, Laing, and Hart 2015; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2017; Gerring and Knutsen 2019; Farah et al. 2020; Meng 2021; Zeng 2020; Helms 2020c; Cohen 2023; Kokkonen, Møller, and Sundell 2024.