uFrom about forty minutes onwards the tone became awkward; Sandra Maischberger now acted mostly snappy, dismissive, sovereign. Perhaps because she had the feeling that she had already gone too far to accommodate the chancellor – or that she had let him say too many familiar things, given the critical world issues from Russia to China and the usual dysfunctional traffic lights.
For example, is it really “natural,” as Scholz wanted us to believe, that Germany’s intelligence services, unlike America’s, found out about the Wagner group’s “attempted coup” almost as late as the rest of the world?
So what was wrong with the show’s architecture? Was her sloppy last third a linguistic skipping act by the moderator because the first two thirds lacked journalistic bite? But how about biting, since there is little time to think about where to hit? After all, all the sticks that are held out in public space at a given point in time have to be jumped over.
Arguments ignored
In any case, one cannot come to Olaf Scholz with the platitude of poor communication if at the same time one does not address his arguments, which have been presented in detail (from asylum to the minimum wage, from the new office building next to the Chancellery, which costs at least 800 million euros, to the heating law), but him, the shying away from deeper involvement, tried to throw off the concept with marginal aspects and even with antics (NATO-critical youth photos of Scholz).
Scholz parried calmly: He would use the amount of 3,000 euros he is likely to be entitled to for inflation compensation for a good cause. With this strategy of composure, this time not applied too thickly as usual (an occasionally added “I think” was good rhetorical service here), he let Maischberger run into nothing again and again, without her really seeming to notice that she was did themselves a disservice with their strenuous attempts to examine the chancellor in a long final chord.
Scholz declares unimpressed
example asylum. Here Scholz did what everyone expected of him: he explained the political decisions. Again and again, almost up and down, he explained why today’s European refugee system is “completely absurd”. He calmly got started, unimpressed by a moderator who tended to be jittery: “80 percent of the refugees who arrive in Germany – and I don’t mean the Ukrainian refugees, but the rest – are not registered,” says Scholz. “That means they were somewhere in Europe and should have applied for asylum there, but that didn’t happen, they turned up at our place at some point.”
The core of the controversial, most recent European decision on asylum is a “solidarity mechanism”, which he ideally represented without its imbalances as follows: In return for the fact that “the countries at the borders actively help” in registering refugees, “we would accept in return and promise that those who are registered there will also be accepted by other countries in solidarity”, so that this is not limited to countries like Italy, Greece, Spain or Portugal – but in fact not to Germany either.
A failed joke
Maischberger shortened the entire debate on this to a single player, in which Scholz talked about the already criticized “joke” he had made at the European Council: Germany, he said, to point out the untenability of the current “absurd system”, ” must have a large beach on the Mediterranean, because in fact more refugees who come to Europe via the Mediterranean arrive in Germany than in the individual countries bordering on the Mediterranean”.
Scholz also rejected the fact that this could have been rhetorically insensitive with the argument that Maischberger’s objection “if they (the refugees) don’t sink beforehand and remain lying on the seabed” describes a separate situation, namely “a serious, major humanitarian problem, where we have to take care of it together in Europe, and I will do everything to make it happen”.
To then start again in terms of “absurdity”: “But I think the worst thing you can do is to talk things around and, for example, to keep quiet about the fact that it’s like I just said, that the vast majority of those who arrive in this country, don’t come to the border in Germany first of all, but have already been somewhere else in the European Union, we don’t have any external borders at all”.
Scholz in the know-it-all interrogation
Maischberger remained no less stubborn in her de-thematization of the subject by reducing it to the insubordinately caricaturing depiction in the beach picture: “Nevertheless,” she said, “nonetheless one could perhaps take this as a subject where one does not joke, but well, that was just a suggestion.” In order to then interrogate Scholz on the subject of “know-it-all” – harping on about statements by his father that Olaf was one as a child. Well.
In view of such an unwillingness to pursue the arguments put forward by Scholz other than with flippant heckling (Maischberger: “Minimum wage, minimum wage!”), the Chancellor could have sung about the crooked, but factually cogent, image that communication is not a one-way street. Instead he said: “I’m probably the head of government in Germany who communicates the most.” And he didn’t mean it as a joke.
