The coalition is tired and the Liberals in particular have had a tough week. You look for a profile and you find it - an almost fraternal sexism debate.
How quickly politics can ruin an image! This applies to government alliances as well as to garden tools. Blessed are the memories of childhood, when I did the first and so far last plant work of my life, namely splashing around in the flower beds with a bright green watering can. Today, after all sorts of untargeted relief packages, this plastic utensil has fallen into disrepute - I would only dare to go to the rhododendrons with a toothbrush cup.
The lemon shares the reputational decline of the watering can: when the green and yellow met to form a coalition to stand up to the SPD together, they were called the "citrus coalition". That sounded sour, fresh and cool, a bit like the punk band "The Lemons" from the eighties. You took a famous selfie and you were in a really good mood. Since then, the yellow portion of the fruit in particular has aged. I don't want to give anyone any ideas - but the British newspaper "Daily Mail" is currently filming a damp head of lettuce because it bets it will outlast Prime Minister Liz Truss.
Even the liberal F.A.Z. bitingly breaks down the four state elections: "four games, four defeats" are those, Lindner, "in the stretch operation", look "into the abyss". The state is in demand in times of crisis, and even an FDP cannot avoid it - and now, awakened by Oktoberfest, summery nonchalance and the cold season, the Corona monster is raising its ugly square skull again.
The only consolation: Olaf Scholz is still at the top. If there were a chancellor with more charisma than a fax machine, things would look a lot worse for the liberals. In case you don't know what I mean - Scholz said this week about the nuclear power plant dispute: "It's not about the fact that it doesn't happen." No, that's not a typo, it really sounded so lame and confused and beige and dull.
Next to such a Scholz there is room for the public to be charmed. But the FDP feels for potential like an electrician in an old socket. Like the Union, the FDP cannot decide whether it wants to be a bit progressive or rather a terrier, dragging the left-green government onto the path of bourgeois reason.
The chairman has decided in terms of nuclear power plant stretching and put on his hind legs. What else? What should the Liberals, please, score points with? By preventing a speed limit? FDP Vice President Johannes Vogel recently campaigned for "modernization projects". However, digitization is more complicated than a watering can: A modernization of the commercial register, for example, meant that everyone could look at someone else's marriage certificate online at handelsregister.de. Medium successful.
After all, the party draws attention to itself when it comes to traffic. On the one hand, there is the 49-euro ticket from
In Kubicki's appearance there is so much sultry male assault that she could definitely fill Rainer Brüderle's dirndl. Anyone who believes that the dowsing rod for important party personalities dangles between their own legs represents the gesture of retired gentlemen - but not the liberal future. The traffic light in the crisis is a burden for the liberals, but they can also shoot themselves to pieces.
The FDP shares the fate of the Union: It feels like half of their clientele are boomers in spirit, half are people who simply don't feel like left-green ideology and are still no longer stuck in the 50s. These people are currently threatened by political homelessness.
The only consolation: the whole traffic light looks similarly plucked like the FDP. Even federal minister Robert Habeck has lost his charisma. His appearance in the daily topics sounded like parents asking their pubescent child on Friday evening how things are going at school. Ingo Zamperoni stated that there was a lot of dispute with the FDP. Habeck: "Yes. What's the question?" Zamperoni: "Don't you want to settle this, this bickering?" Habeck: "Of course." It is monosyllabic, which is otherwise only known from the Federal Chancellor.
Actually, politicians reel off what they want in interviews. Only beginners answer the journalists' questions. The pro says what the pro wants to say:
That's roughly how it works.
The government alliance is "pulling on the same rope," as former government spokesman Georg Streiter once put it. Unless Scholz believes he can govern without the Liberals, he should postpone the exit of the traffic light from the FDP, even if there is currently little threat from the opposition. The CDU is continuing to transform itself into a resentment ramp, as it showed again this week. Ex-Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner has now found a grotesque government-financed website on which children were recommended to take puberty blockers - at least that's what it looked like. The left-green traffic light wants to destroy our children, that's what Klöckner actually wanted to say.
However, it is a website from the GroKo era, when Klöckner sat at the table. In addition, the site is written in "easy language", i.e. for people with reading disabilities, which sounds like popular educational gender ideology, but does not prove it. Such outrage is opposition work for the regulars' table - in this respect, nothing has changed since Friedrich Merz's "social tourism" faux pas. Meanwhile we watch the AfD, which blossoms like a bun forgotten in the satchel over the summer holidays.
The winner is currently red-green, which could also be read into the Lower Saxony elections. The chancellor must now give the FDP a little leash if the coalition is to last another three years. Many a terrier would rather be a yellow retriever.
