Less than a week into his tenure, Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is already reminding the rest of the world of one of his rarer political talents: an ability to frustrate journalists with answers so vague and formulaic they once earned him the nickname “Scholz-o-matic”. Social Democrat Scholz, who will govern in a “traffic light” coalition with the Green party and the liberal Free Democratic party, on Sunday left his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, none the wiser about his plans for the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, which Poland has urged its western neighbour to scrap. At a joint press conference with the Polish prime minister, Germany’s ninth chancellor skirted the subject by projecting into the future: within 25 years, “which is not that far”, he said, Germany would no longer use gas as an energy resource anyway. The previous day, when asked after a meeting with Emmanuel Macron how the two European nations would react if Russia were to invade Ukraine, and whether he was ready to review the Maastricht criteria on inflation, the French president took almost three minutes to answer the questions at length. Scholz, meanwhile, responded with three generic statements: “One thing is very clear right now: we have to cooperate, we have to act, and put effort into this in Europe. But that requires that our borders hold firm, and we are working to de-escalate conflict. And we want to make sure that the future is open to everyone.” Scholz had already given the foreign press a flavour of his trademark rhetorical manoeuvre when presenting his left-liberal government’s coalition treaty earlier this month. Asked by a journalist from the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf to comment on whether he felt responsible for the riots and lootings after the 2017 G20 in Hamburg, where Scholz was mayor at the time, he ignored the question entirely and said: “We agreed during coalition talks to do everything to ensure that domestic security is guaranteed. Police will receive all the support it needs to make sure crime won’t have a chance in Germany.” “The Scholzomat is back,” said the Welt am Sonntag journalist Dagmar Rosenfeld, reviewing clips of Scholz’s first press conferences on German television on Sunday night. The nickname was coined by the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit in 2003, when Scholz was general secretary of the Social Democratic party (SPD) under the then chancellor Gerhard Schröder and tended to defend his party’s line by repeating the same set of phrases. “General secretaries quickly learn to formulate their answers in the vaguest way possible, and delete the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ from their vocabulary,” said Lars Haider in Olaf Scholz: The Path to Power, the first biography of the new chancellor, published this week. Haider, the editor of Hamburg’s local newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, recalls in his book how the politician later adapted his strategy in dealings with the press, sometimes giving answers so monosyllabic that the interviewer simply ran out of questions. The purpose, however, remained the same. “As a rule questions are not answered directly, be it only not to give interviewers the impressions that they can determine the subject of the conversation,” Haider wrote. As such, Scholz’s rhetorical habits are not a far cry from those of his predecessor Angela Merkel’s, whose speeches were often deliberately flat and formulaic, as to not cause unintended diplomatic disturbances. “Every sentence a politician says has to be said in a way that is understandable by everyone, even those who aren’t present,” Scholz told Haider in one interview. “You can’t rely on the context to be conveyed in which the sentence is said.” The German press this week conceded Scholz’s robot-like ways had probably done his career more good than bad. “But it does lay bare a strange understanding of journalism,” said Der Spiegel’s Markus Feldenkirchen. “And especially a chancellor should aim higher.”