Enlarge image
Armin Laschet and Horst Seehofer visit the Steinbachtalsperre: in elections you don't choose programs
Photo: Christoph Hardt / imago images / Future Image
Election campaigns are exhausting for everyone: for those who want to be elected, but also for those who want to vote. Probably even for those who are not interested in elections and still get the spectacle. While in the debates of the past weeks and months about résumés, university degrees, plagiarism and disguises on election posters, one often heard that one should please talk about »content«. Now that Germany is experiencing a flood disaster, it is often said that this event should not be "instrumentalized" for the election campaign. Both allegations are based on an unrealistic idea of political discussion. Because pure, content-based discourse is a myth. It never existed.
What Habermas calls the "peculiarly informal compulsion of the better argument" does not even apply in university seminars or reading groups, because even there there will always be someone who is trying to get a job or a little fame.
And in political debates this informal constraint does not apply.
Especially not in situations where there are legitimate questions about whether better policies could have prevented a flood disaster and how one can prevent further such events in the future.
In elections one does not choose programs
It is true that it is wrong to instrumentalize events in which people die or lose their homes for political purposes when "instrumentalizing" means the same as "abusing".
But not every thematization is an instrumentalization.
It should probably look noble when the CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak wrote on Twitter about the flood: “We now have to stand together as a country and help those people who are in need.
The election campaign should also rest for the time being in the next few days. ”He probably knows himself that this is not possible.
How should it
And how many "next days" does he imagine?
The repair of the flood damage and the grief of the people will not be completed by the federal election, and the fear of further extreme weather conditions will remain.
This is primarily a struggle for survival, but cannot be separated from an election campaign.
more on the subject
Politics in the flood disaster: The days of rubber boots A comment by Stefan Kuzmany
In elections you don't choose programs, but parties and people, which of course means that it is relevant how individual politicians * behave in an emergency. Whether they want to stick to their current climate policy, whether they deny the causes or not - or whether they can still laugh like Armin Laschet in the face of death and misery in the background. Of course, Laschet is only a person who can make mistakes. But the people who are horrified by his behavior are just human. They hope that their future chancellor may have some empathy.
Before the flood, when we were still busy with Annalena Baerbock's book, Wolfgang Schäuble gave an interview in which he said: "What we are currently experiencing is a completely normal election campaign." He was partly right and partly not. With regard to the attempts to discredit Baerbock, he was wrong when he said that women today are "no more difficult in politics" than men. Funny that then only 31 percent of the members of the Bundestag are women. But he was right that this election campaign is "normal" in the sense that it is still normal for women to be punished differently than men. (Or has he seen faked nude photos of Laschet and Scholz?)
But no matter whether you think that the election campaign needs more content or less instrumentalization or is completely normal: Fortunately, you can still choose which topics you consider worthy topics. Any demand for better or different content, if it does not name this content, is initially only a distinction.
Philipp Amthor thought it was a "strange sign of a completely unobjective election campaign" when people on the Internet (thanks Antifa) pointed out that he had recently laughed and photographed with two neo-Nazis, one of whom was wearing a T-shirt to show solidarity with a well-known Holocaust denier called. Of course there were people on the spot who explained that as a politician you can't proofread every T-shirt of a selfie-loving citizen with a side parting. To point out such a photo is not as irrelevant as Amthor would like it to be. The photo itself is of course not a detailed treatise on Amthor's stance on right-wing radicalism, but it was just a tweet and it was correct so far.
A discourse can only be as complex as the place where it takes place allows. That is why contributions to the discussion are different, depending on whether they are introduced in the Bundestag, in the pub, on Twitter or at the top of the pool slide.
Free discourse also means: You can choose whether to participate and with what. You don't have to react to every nonsense. But you don't have to make an exhausted contribution on every topic just because you could. For example, I am currently quite appalled that at the same time as numerous heat waves, fire and flood disasters, a "space race" is taking place in which obscenely rich men (mostly men, that's how it is) let themselves be shot into space. Sustainable tourism, ciao. And that while others are wondering whether they can still eat avocados now or whether they will then be to blame for further natural disasters.
I could have written an extensively researched text about climate issues and space travel, but I decided to just tweet that space tourism is the mangiest man's hobby ever. I knew that someone would write to me, saying that women would also take part (happened after 3 minutes) and that I hate men (after all, only after 29 minutes). Because that's Twitter.
What I want to say: The discussions about the right kind of political debates - and therefore also: election campaigns - would be more productive if people considered where they are taking place and how they have always been. Someone can criticize Laschet's laughter and donate for those affected by the flood at the same time. Or criticize Amthor's photos and comment in detail on his speeches in the Bundestag. But there will never be a place where we all meet with elected election programs and then discuss our notes in an informal, serious atmosphere, and to be honest: fortunately.