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Jens Spahn, Angela Merkel: Even the health minister considered a second lockdown in September to be unlikely
Photo: HANNIBAL HANSCHKE / REUTERS
To create a vaccine against a new type of virus, you need specialists, a lot of money, equipment, several months of time and, last but not least, luck.
It takes a few people, a pad and pen, and a few days to devise a political strategy.
One should think so.
Nevertheless, after about a year of pandemic, vaccination in Germany against the new corona virus will start this weekend, but there still does not seem to be a political strategy.
There are currently no indications that this could change soon.
With a view to the upcoming super election year, it even looks more as if the lack of strategy is extending into the election campaign.
The pandemic reveals how politics works - and how it doesn't.
The belief in careful strategic political planning is widespread.
Women voters demand it from politics.
How else could it be able to cope with the problems of the times?
Journalists interpret them into action.
How else would power struggles work?
Finally, conspiracy theorists need it as a basic assumption.
How else would a dark cabal even be conceivable?
Let the summer go by
In reality, politics is often an attempt to somehow get through the day, the week, the next month.
Somehow keeping an overview, somehow processing what needs to be processed (mostly too much).
Because something always comes up because the world is complicated.
Like everywhere else in real life.
Sometimes, in confidential talks, politicians even admit it themselves.
How much politics gropes in this pandemic and how little it plans strategically is nevertheless remarkable.
In the summer, the discussion ranged between the two poles of "loosening" or "not loosening" - even when the number of infections was rising.
One could have assumed that a plan would be developed instead during this time: If this and that indicator develop in one way or another, measure A or B will follow. But the summer passed, and there was no plan.
There were also recommendations for schools, but no actual strategy until the end.
Rather, they tested how long it would go with extensive face-to-face teaching.
Even the very plan to make a plan was discarded
At the beginning of September, Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) said that we now know more about the virus and how to deal with it, and that there is probably no need for a second lockdown, for example in retail.
A new lockdown was decided in October.
In the meantime, the retail trade is almost completely closed.
On November 16, this second lockdown had just been in effect for two weeks, when the Prime Ministers and the Chancellor met again.
Afterwards, Michael Müller (SPD), the current chairman of the Prime Minister's Conference, said they wanted to prepare the next meeting very well, because then resolutions would be pending that should offer a long-term perspective and planning security.
"Today we have stated in concrete terms that this should also be formulated within the framework of a long-term concept, an overall concept, how we can get through these certainly not easy winter months that lie ahead of us."
In the resolution of November 25th, the words »February«, »March«, »spring« or »summer« do not appear, not even »in the long term«. Instead, it is about measures for Christmas and New Year.
Of course also about vaccinations and the distribution of FFP2 masks to risk groups, but that wasn't a real long-term plan.
Even the very plan to make a plan was obviously discarded.
Now politicians not only have to deal with the pandemic, but also with the upcoming elections.
Bundestag elections in September, state elections in Baden-Württemberg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Berlin, Rhineland-Palatinate, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Union has achieved extremely good values in surveys, 35 to 40 percent.
The smaller opposition parties are sliding closer to the five percent mark, very close like the FDP, or a little closer like the Left.
Greens and SPD are not moving.
If it stays that way, the only question for the Chancellor will be whether he comes from the CDU or the CSU.
Hope that Merkel's departure will change everything
Especially since the only green and the only left-wing prime minister are up for re-election, plus three state heads of the SPD, but only one of the CDU.
The others could lose their strongholds, the CDU can almost only harm itself if it should cooperate with the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt or Thuringia.
Reason enough for the other parties to approach this election year in a particularly strategic way.
But if you talk to politicians from different parties about this election year and the strategy, the conversations often quickly return to this argument: You first have to see who the CDU is nominating.
As party leader and then as candidate for chancellor.
Merz, Laschet, Röttgen, Spahn or Söder - that changes a lot, a lot depends on that.
Above all, however, when it dawns on the voters that Angela Merkel is really leaving, the Union will also be reassessed.
In the SPD, for example, it is hoped that the voters will then turn to the most remarkable candidate: Olaf Scholz.
One could say: Merkel should fix it again, this time with her departure.
Similarly, when it comes to the content.
On the left, for example, one hopes that the crisis costs will become a big issue over the summer, that the question arises of who has to pay for the crisis in order to then distinguish themselves as a party of social equality.
In the FDP, one hopes that the crisis costs will become a big topic over the summer in order to then distinguish itself as a party of the economy.
What if the crisis costs don't become a big issue?
What if Merkel's farewell doesn't change everything?
Then not.
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