German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was under growing pressure Tuesday to step aside as the top candidate of his Social Democrats (SPD) for snap polls in February, as the party heads for a historic drubbing.
Senior members of the SPD joined the chorus of voices calling for him to make way for popular Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, while a survey showed Scholz's popularity with the public had sunk to new depths.
Germany is set to hold elections seven months earlier than scheduled after the collapse of Scholz's three-party coalition earlier this month.
Scholz, currently taking part in the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, has signalled that he wants to run for a second term as chancellor.
But Norbert Walter-Borjans, a former leader of the SPD, said he believed Pistorius would have a better chance of beating conservative chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz, currently leading the race.
"Scholz has saved our country from many threats in an extremely difficult time," Walter-Borjans told the Rheinische Post newspaper.
"But... Merz can only be stopped with a chancellor (candidate) who has the strength to make the difference in a self-critical and approachable manner," he added.
"That has been Scholz's weak point so far," he said.
Pistorius claimed the top spot in a ranking of Germany's most popular politicians published by the Bild daily on Tuesday, while Scholz had fallen from 19th to 20th place.
Putin phonecall
Der Spiegel magazine meanwhile reported that two influential members of the SPD in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, had also come out in support of Pistorius.
"Scholz's current reputation is strongly linked to the (collapsed) coalition," SPD politicians Wiebke Esdar and Dirk Wiese said, adding that they were seeing "a lot of support for Pistorius" in their constituencies.
The embattled chancellor is also facing a backlash over his controversial decision to hold a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week.
For the moment, Scholz still has the backing of the SPD party leadership.
Former party leader Gerhard Schroeder, who was chancellor between 1998 and 2005 but has since been mired in controversy over his close links to Russia, has also spoken out in Scholz's favour.
"The party cannot destroy its own chancellor," he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Tuesday.
Pistorius has also stressed his backing for Scholz but on Monday evening hinted he was open to the idea of running for chancellor, insisting that "in politics, you should never rule anything out".
"The only thing I can definitely rule out is becoming pope," he told journalists in Bavaria.
'No economic expertise'
The unruly three-party coalition headed by Scholz since 2021 came crashing down earlier this month when the chancellor fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner.
Lindner's liberal Free Democrats (FDP) left the government as a result, leaving the SPD and their Green coalition partners as a minority government.
On December 16 Scholz will submit himself to a vote of confidence that he is expected to lose, paving the way for a general election on February 23.
In the latest poll from the Forsa institute, the SPD is languishing on 15 percent of the vote, a big drop from the 25.7 percent it managed at the last general election in 2021.
The conservative CDU/CSU has a commanding lead on 33 percent with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in second place on 18 percent.
Even if the SPD does decide to try a switch at the top ahead of the election, some observers point out that there is no guarantee this would turn the party's fortunes around.
Pistorius "has no economic expertise", an editorial on the NTV news site pointed out.
Given the current struggles of Europe's biggest economy, "it is precisely this issue that is expected to decide the election", it said.