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SPIEGEL author and "expert" Markus Feldenkirchen as a guest in May 2021 on the talk show "Markus Lanz"
Photo: teutopress / IMAGO
Journalists like me who were not born in Delphi are not good oracles.
The past election year finally showed me that - above all the case, or rather: the rise of a certain Olaf Scholz, whom neither I nor most of my colleagues had attested a chance at the Chancellery.
Congratulations!
Olaf Scholz has actually been Chancellor since December 8, 2021.
Since these federal elections, I have made up my mind to make predictions about the outcome of Bundesliga games in the future.
I think at least that I know my way around.
Until the summer of the year that was coming to an end, I didn't bet a single chanterelle on Olaf Scholz and the SPD.
On all the channels available to me, I declared with a serious expression and inner conviction that the matter was over for Scholz.
That his party, the SPD, was simply through.
And that even he, the top candidate, could never, ever generate the momentum that is decisive in election campaigns.
I advocated this thesis in SPIEGEL articles, in columns, in the morning newsletter, in the SPIEGEL editorial, in conversations with friends and in Markus Lanz's talk show.
We journalists in Berlin, who our colleagues like to question as political observers and experts, in truth far too seldom trust our own observations, but too often rely on the supposed findings of some survey slips.
When I take part in such surveys myself, I usually claim to be a 95-year-old woman from the Allgäu who voted for the AfD.
To cover the tracks.
I have no idea whether they can see through such maneuvers and still know what I would really choose.
In any case, the 2021 federal election is a lesson to me.
From now on I consider everything to be possible that is theoretically conceivable.
Even such crazy theses as the one that Olaf Scholz will one day become Federal Chancellor.
