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Host Anne Will
Photo: ARD Das Erste / obs
Everyone should know it: the Corona conversation.
It's a bit of what the soccer talk used to be.
Or the weather talk.
The simplest type of non-binding basic communication.
You wait for your colleagues in front of the video conference, you meet the neighbor at the front door: The Corona conversation follows.
And like football and weather, the situation is not good.
Which makes the conversation easier.
One speaks of hobby national coach to hobby national coach.
Accordingly, "I don't understand why ..." is probably the most popular sentence start in the Corona conversation and its basic rhetorical form.
How things continue then depends on what is not working again, what you have read or heard - it's always true.
Or does someone understand why the digitization of schools is not going better?
Why is there no pandemic minister?
Why is there no more testing?
For the Corona conversation, the whole pandemic is a collection of things that don't work, of decisions that were half-hearted, of compromises that shouldn't have been.
From the unsuccessful procurement of masks to the Corona app, which was argued about for weeks, and which has been measuring on a few million smartphones since then.
From the lack of preparation for the second wave to the vaccine acquisition disaster.
Something comes together.
Clever thoughts - and a Bavarian appearance
That's why there is always something to talk about in the big German Corona conversation.
That also has something calming about it.
Because when you then part, you usually do so with the feeling that the other person sees the situation very much like you do. And you are alone with your problems.
But at least not with his view of the world.
Watching the most powerful politicians in the country during the Corona conversation, however, has something depressing.
“Lockdown instead of a perspective plan - is there really no alternative to German pandemic policy?” Was the central question that was to be argued with Anne Will yesterday evening.
However, it was clear from the start that this would not happen.
Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD), Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU), Green party leader Annalena Baerbock and FDP chairman Christian Lindner were invited.
Who should have credibly sketched an alternative here?
Scholz and Söder are key players in German pandemic policy.
And the Greens, like the FDP, are involved in enough state governments that they are also involved in the politics that we have.
And so it came to a classic corona conversation.
Annalena Baerbock said smart things about the children in the pandemic and that they shouldn't be let down.
That completely different efforts would have to be made.
Which of course is true.
Christian Lindner called for more tests, more air filters and also a perspective as to when the culture could open again.
Of course, no one contradicted this either.
Markus Söder described the situation from the point of view of the Prime Minister and State Father (it was a strikingly Bavarian appearance. Someone who wants to become Federal Chancellor definitely does not say repeatedly that his country can do everything best).
Even if politics is slowly becoming at a loss
Only Olaf Scholz fell out a little - his role in the group was that of the actual national coach, who patiently listens to what other thoughts are in order to then say what the decision-makers are doing in real life.
It was all very pleasant - and at the same time extremely bizarre.
Because, as colleague Melanie Amann, the head of the SPIEGEL capital city office, who was also in the group, noted: Nobody seems to be responsible in the corona pandemic (except Olaf Scholz).
Some of the country's most important politicians sit together and talk just as clueless and know-it-all as the rest of the country.
In the knowledge that tomorrow will continue as it has been all along.
It probably has to be like that.
In fact, the special thing about the pandemic situation is that politics and citizens are in the same boat.
That politics is much more dependent on the collaboration of the population than in the great crises of the past.
Nevertheless, it is not so easy to shake off the impression that our highly complex social system with all its differentiated voting mechanisms and its art of finding consensus is reaching its limits in this pandemic.
Why not do it like Western Australia?
There was an interesting moment on the show.
That was when Markus Söder talked about the Australian city of Perth.
Australia got the pandemic under control by following a strategy that a number of scientists in Germany called “NoCovid” are calling for.
This means reducing the incidence to zero in one act of violence - and thereby gaining scope for a new normal.
When a single corona case then occurred in Perth, according to Söder, the entire metropolis was sent into lockdown until the case was resolved and there was no longer any risk of further spread.
That would have been the alternative to German politics announced by the title of the show.
This could have been talked about profitably.
But Söder, probably rightly, cleared up the story himself: That just doesn't work in Germany.
Vaccination, that was our long-term strategy against Corona.
Which in this exclusivity was never a good idea.
And now even that doesn't work as it should.
That's how we stand now.
With a medium-hard lockdown that can drag on for a very long time.
With virus mutations, of which a few more will definitely come.
For the time being, we can only hold on to the hope that it will eventually pass.
And in many "I don't understand why ..." sentences that we citizens say to ourselves as well as politicians.
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