Pressure mounts on Scholz over bid for second term

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.

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".