In the coalition, hairline cracks grow into fractures. It is ideologically at odds, there is no visible leadership, and serious breakdowns are piling up. It's a crisis, but Scholz can't find his role.
Politics in summer is always special. With political activity slowing down but the media carrying on as before, there is a risk of an avalanche on the dumbest topics. And so even some politicians got lost in the stupid "Winnetou" debate - topics that only summer gives birth to.
Politicians also found themselves physically in weird situations - Federal Minister of Agriculture Cem Özdemir has just successfully thrown a pretzel, the Chancellor can be seen in an electric truck, between the twin 35-millimeter cannons of an anti-aircraft tank or the breasts of political activists. If you asked him where he felt most comfortable, he would probably answer: "In my office."
That's where it's going again: He finally has to find solutions because things are looking bad. It looks bad, the SPD, the traffic light, Germany, at least from an internal perspective. Governments actually benefit when things get extremely uncomfortable - but this chancellor also seems to have failed historical constants.
The Germans don't feel the chancellor, according to a Forsa survey, 90 percent don't notice anything about the relief worth billions, more than 70 percent no longer understand where and how they are being helped. Now the 9-euro ticket, "one of the best ideas" (Scholz), is running out and, phew, the gas levy is coming. It's about as popular as a snapped toenail or a $9 ticket only for the rich. That is no coincidence, because it is: A levy for the rich (energy companies). Somehow you didn't consider that.
The mood in the country is gloomy. The gas surcharge fuels a primal German fear: the German fear of shortcomings. This fear of "too little" has become deeply embedded in our culture and shows its ugly face again and again. It showed itself in two world wars, in the attacks in Rostock-Lichtenhagen thirty years ago, in the Pegida protests and every day in the form of a loud minority of unconventional rabid thinkers.
"Those up there," the foreigners and/or the Jews take everything away from us and pour themselves a double dose of it - that's how the thinking goes. In view of the lack of masks on the government plane, however, there is not much to counter this old, boring tale. If Habeck had just been wearing an ugly sweater, Scholz might think, that might have been an issue.
How could that happen? How can a government decide to make masks compulsory on the plane and at the same time plant itself in the cabin without a mask? It's like putting a neat lectern in front of a gigantic pile of rubble in a devastated flood area - Armin Laschet laughs.
Scholz and his communications team suffer from situational blindness, with consequences that endanger their existence. A Palestinian President in the Chancellery can (expectably) deny the Holocaust, a government delegation can swing champagne in a war zone, or an airplane full of elite people chat excitedly and without masks, somehow these things go past those who should be careful at the point. Why?
And we are only at the beginning: the chancellor values are now falling, as are the economic forecasts. An economic crap decade is coming up. The Huawei boss wants his employees to "get a shiver down their spines," it has now become known.
The liberal Marie-Agnes Strack-Klartext-Zimmermann puts it a little more subtly: The war will "require personal sacrifices from all of us, but we shouldn't become weak despite everything." What sacrifices does top politics bring? The words ring hollow.
In fact, a recession is a good moment for a chancellor's speech. "You will never walk alone" is a consolation, not a story, the sentence does not encourage. The chancellor is currently without history. What role does Germany, the continent's economic giant, play in times of European war and global recession? What is the role of that country that was only forced onto the path of democracy by a war? What is the vision of the state that forced its neighbors in the south to carry out reforms beyond the pain threshold during the financial crisis?
Filling the communicative vacuum, that's always the way, others. The Union has made every effort to portray the traffic light as a Sabbel cabinet in which many proposals circulated but no decisions were made. The FDP fights for every political square centimeter, because it can't do otherwise in the red-green neighborhood.
But the hairline cracks grow into fractures that can quickly gape without a narrative connection. Political convictions do not stop mercifully in the crisis: the liberals insist on the debt brake, the Greens do not want nuclear power (the Japanese, while they are postponing the clean-up work in Fukushima, do).
Economists and officials of all political persuasions are publicly turning the relief ideas from the traffic lights through the meat grinder, while Scholz is trying to tame the coalition members. Negotiating quietly and then presenting compromises, that was a thing of the past. You haven't seen a coalition selfie for a long time. The magic of beginning is consumed.
Democratic elections, with all their noise and simplification, usually get someone to the top with at least a little rhetorical flourish. But Scholz was, that's the cold reality, only the lesser evil, next to a derailed Armin Laschet and Annalena Baerbock, who stumbled because of plagiarism. That pays off every day.
The chancellor needs a historical container for the arduous compromises of the ideologically fragmented traffic light. This vessel was supposed to be "progress", Scholz's own story was "respect for you". Neither works in war and recession. A narrative void is created that cannot be replaced by images and measures, but easily fills in mishaps such as masks and relativization of the Holocaust.
Scholz could meanwhile jump from tank to tank in a bamboo skirt and throw bundles of euros to the people, none of that can replace what is missing: charisma and narrative. Given the communicative vacuum, some have long seen Robert Habeck as a threat to the chancellor. But if anyone has a winter of anger, it's Robert "Gasumlage" Habeck. And there are situations from which you can't mumble your way out of, even with a charming camera view.
