Olaf Scholz, Germany's finance minister and deputy to outoing Chancellor Angela Merkel, has arguably the best chance to be the country's first leader of the post-Merkel era. Back at the start of his campaign for the chancellorship, winning an election seemed like a long shot: His Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffered the worst electoral result in its history in 2017 with 20.5 per cent of the vote, and its numbers had slid further as junior coalition partner to Merkel's conservatives. Yet during an SPD campaign that focussed on Scholz's personal popularity with the electorate, there was a rema...