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Maybrit Illner and her guests: "Right, left, across - who benefits from fear and division?"
Photo: ZDF / Jule Roehr
Actually, the AfD is burning interesting at the moment.
For years it was able to successfully create the impression that bourgeois conservatives and right-wing radicals could have a place in one party.
Alexander Gauland and Jörg Meuthen wanted it that way.
They kept in touch with all camps, lulled or suspended, depending on what seemed right.
And now it's over with that.
At some point in the coming year, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution will announce whether it will be monitoring the entire party.
And some, the circles around Meuthen, believe that the party will lose a lot of voters through such an observation, and now want to get rid of the right-wing extremists, with whom they got along well yesterday.
And the right-wing extremists actually see their party as a system alternative, so observation by the protection of the constitution is a matter of honor.
That is the story of the AfD party conference last weekend, which was supposed to be about social policy and became the place of this struggle for power in and the direction of the party.
One could have made an interesting program about it.
With AfD people who quarrel and experts who shed light on the background.
But the way Maybrit Illner's talk show went off yesterday evening, you couldn't help but get the impression that the AfD's time as a major hot topic is perhaps over.
Also good, of course.
Just not necessarily for television.
Tino Chrupalla, master painter from Görlitz, who was elected as a direct candidate for the AfD in the last federal election and now leads the party together with Meuthen, was invited.
Sahra Wagenknecht, former parliamentary group leader of the Left in the Bundestag.
Herbert Reul, Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia and in the CDU.
And the journalist Georg Mascolo.
The failure of the broadcast already laid out in the question
"Right, left, across - who benefits from fear and division?" Was the topic and the strange failure of the program was probably already based on this question.
On the one hand, it already provides the answer that people benefit from "fear and division" at the margins.
In fact, the surveys do not show that at the moment.
The vast majority of Germans think the government's measures are right.
For a minority they don't go far enough.
And for another minority they go too far.
And even if the AfD tries to hang on to the latter: it doesn't really work.
Also because she tried to hang on to the others at the beginning of the year.
So it was unbalanced from the start.
Now, of course, it would still have been possible to talk about who the angry citizens are, what kind of fears they have, and why the right throws themselves at the lateral thinking demonstrations, while the left doesn't.
The staff would have been there: But it didn't really work.
And it should be about the AfD anyway.
But even there, Georg Mascolo was able to cleverly tell what the problems are that the party is currently facing.
But Chrupalla was not naked and said what the politicians of the "old parties", as they are often called in the AfD, say in difficult situations: If there are irreconcilable conflicts, it is "democracy".
If you don't want to commit yourself to any direction, you are the chairman of the "whole party".
If you are asked whether you still have confidence in controversial other characters, the answer is that you "naturally" work together.
And the future is always decided at the next party conference.
Manageable gain in knowledge
Sahra Wagenknecht, on the other hand, can probably be woken up late at night and she will easily give a lecture on the fact that citizens' anger about socially unjust politics is justified and that they only go to the right because the left is too fine for the little ones Became people.
She did that several times here and, as always, it wasn't completely wrong, but it wasn't completely right either.
It's just what Sahra Wagenknecht says.
The gain in knowledge is manageable.
Herbert Reul once flashed a really interesting topic when he talked about how complicated it is at the moment to make the trade-offs.
That it is not economic interests that are in the foreground when decisions are made in the corona policy, but that science has emerged as a new, important player.
How it actually works, what this learning process looks like, how politicians like Reul deal with the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies something like this, you could see in your tired eyes a bit, but would have liked to have known more precisely.
What remains?
Anyone who wants to talk about the AfD should talk about the AfD - and also with her.
And if you want to talk about fear during the Corona period, you should perhaps take the feeling seriously and not immediately ask who "benefits" from it.
Because fears can also tip over very quickly.
“The concern that we have to address,” Reul says at some point, “is that we are dealing with a pandemic that is not under control.” In fact, the political dispute at the moment is mainly about material issues, about the restrictions of easy lockdown.
But the health system is on the verge of resilience.
Even if the vaccine is there, it will take months to vaccinate.
At the moment almost 500 people die a day in Germany, there is no reason to assume that it will decrease in the coming months.
It is hard to imagine that the majority of the population will accept that death comes so close to them.
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