Germany’s acting chancellor Olaf Scholz was set to bow out of office on Friday evening with a special “grand tattoo” military ceremony and a familiar Beatles tune.
After three years, four months and 23 days in power, the 66-year-old hands over power on Tuesday to Friedrich Merz, whose centre-right Christian Democratic Unionwon Germany’s federal election in February.
Germany’s Bundeswehr armed forces stage grand tattoo ceremonies to bid farewell to chancellors, presidents, defence ministers and generals in an event dating back to the 16th century.
Following tradition, Mr Scholz was allowed three requests for musical pieces to be played by the Bundeswehr band. His classical choice was an excerpt from Johann Sebastian Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto. From Tuesday Mr Scholz will be an ordinary backbencher deputy for Brandenburg’s capital Potsdam, where he lives.
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Another musical nod went to In My Life by The Beatles, who played early concerts in Hamburg, where Mr Scholz served as mayor.
His final musical choice was the Aretha Franklin hit Respect, a nod to a keyword of the 2021 election campaign that brought him to power.
The musical choices and their messages caused amusement in the German media, in light of the Scholz coalition’s premature collapse last November.
The Bild tabloid suggested the emotional In My Life, “recalling dead and living friends”, was an odd choice for a politician dubbed the “Scholzomat” for his robotic public persona.
“This file-carrier who ... says nothing and has everything except poetry,” wrote Bild columnist Franz-Josef Wagner. He was equally critical of Mr Scholz’s belated plea for respect: “Dear departing chancellor, if you had told us everything that goes on in your heart, maybe you would today still be chancellor. But your mouth was closed. You had a silent heart.”
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On Wednesday Mr Scholz chaired his 131st and final cabinet meeting which was, his spokesman said afterwards, “as sober as you’d expect from this chancellor”.
Journalists were amused by his musical choices, given respect was not always a priority in his approach to them. After the 2022 G7 summit in Bavaria, for instance, asked if he could say more about possible German security guarantees for Ukraine, a grinning Mr Scholz said: “Yes, I could, that’s it.”
For Scholz biographer Mark Schieritz the episode revealed an unflattering “arrogance of believing that he knows where things are going and that only he understands a subject”.
Mr Scholz had his final public appearance on Friday at a Lutheran church gathering in Hanover. In what sounded like a political epitaph he told an audience how politicians “need to do everything we can to give people confidence and reassurance – ‘the future will be good for me’ – without perceiving others as enemies” .
