He’s “Uncle Olaf,” the “grinning Smurf,” the ”Scholz-o-mat,” and even “the most boring man in Germany.” The current front-runner to become Europe’s most powerful leader has had his fair share of epithets. But with Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) leading polls ahead of today’s federal election, even such a personal focus on Germany’s possible next chancellor has told us little about what he stands for. Yet unlike incumbent Angela Merkel, whose own rise through the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the chancellery was meteoric, Scholz has a long political record at both state and federal levels, with much to tell us about what he has done and who he really is.

Scholz has always been a highly effective machine politician, able to strategically maneuver when it best suited his career. He is widely credited with using his ideological flexibility, skill at hammering out backroom deals, and calm style to rise through the ranks of the troubled SPD — a party which is only now arresting its decades-long decline. But alongside his climb to the top of German politics, Scholz has left traces of scandals that could, and should, come back to haunt him.

Sometimes Scholz’s famed flexibility has led to concrete benefits to workers — particularly in the pandemic. In his role as finance minister in the CDU-SPD grand coalition, he used emergency budgetary provisions to open up the public coffers to prevent mass unemployment, breaking with the tradition of “black zero” budgets — i.e., no surpluses. But Scholz also backed the Hartz IV reforms that gutted German welfare, choked the creaking state of investment through balanced-budget fetishism, endorsed brutal policing methods against activists and migrants in Hamburg, and failed to regulate businesses that robbed state coffers. In some now infamous cases, these businesses even committed massive financial and tax fraud.