AUTO INDUSTRY/GERMANY/TARIFFS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Olaf Scholz took over as Germany’s finance minister in March. Since then, President Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on German cars, called Europe a ‘foe’ and dispatched an ambassador to Berlin who takes selfies with far-right politicians eager to bring down the German government. But in an interview in his sparsely decorated fourth-floor office in the finance ministry, once the headquarters of the Nazi Luftwaffe, Mr. Scholz professed to be ‘relaxed.’ There is nothing like a bit of venom from the White House to unite Europe’s ‘progressive liberal center,’ says the man who is Chancellor Angela Merkel’s No. 2…Short, balding and poker-faced, Mr. Scholz is by default the leading voice of social democracy in Europe, a movement in crisis trying to prove its relevance in the age of populism. He was a fiery young socialist in the 1970s who gradually mellowed into a post-ideological centrist. First defending workers as a labor lawyer, then defending labor-market reforms to workers and now co-governing with a conservative Chancellor, Mr. Scholz has traveled a journey that in many ways tracks that of his ailing Social Democratic Party.”
–Katrin Bennhold and Jack Ewing, “In Germany, a Social Democrat Who Welcomes Trump’s Bluster,” The New York Times online, September 28, 2018