The situation in the morning - Angela Merkel is finally allowed to receive a state guest for dinner again

Today it's about the first state dinner in the Chancellery since Corona, the first anniversary of the Wirecard bankruptcy and the first impression of Olaf Scholz with his neighbors.

Operation in the Chancellery kitchen

Today, for the first time since the pandemic,

Angela Merkel is

receiving a

foreign guest for dinner at the Chancellery

, French President

Emmanuel Macron

, and I wonder whether the Chancellor is looking forward to such encounters with real people in closed rooms as much as normal people. Whether she says in the morning at the Chancellery: "People, the Macron is coming today, I'm so happy!"

And then her office manager Beate Baumann says: Ms. Merkel, please really think about your vaccination certificate this time. And then government spokesman Steffen Seibert asks whether the Chancellor won't take a cell phone selfie for Twitter at least once ...? And then the head of the Chancellery, Helge Braun, clears his throat and points out that it is still unclear whether there might not be a tangent to France with this mask story from Spahn, and then it is a completely normal day in the Chancellery again.

Before Macron comes, Merkel will give a speech at a "National Aviation Conference 2021", which will be about reviving the industry after the pandemic.

Macron, in turn, will attend a memorial service before his departure for the French General Charles de Gaulle, who on June 18, 1942, after the defeat by Nazi Germany, called on his countrymen not to give up.

With this in mind, Macron and Merkel then want to sound out joint positions for the

meeting of the European Council

on June 24th and 25th.

• Technical difficulties: where there is still a problem with digital vaccination records

Wirecard and its helpers

It was exactly a year ago that

the German fairy tale company Wirecard collapsed

.

On June 18, 2020, an ad hoc announcement confirmed what the colleagues in the Financial Times in particular had researched and reported time and again: Wirecard's balance sheet was based on incorrect figures, alleged balances in billions could not be found.

Years before, there had been allegations of fraud about Wirecard and its CEO Markus Braun.

"Can you guarantee that Wirecard is clean?" Asked SPIEGEL Braun in September 2018. "I can," he replied.

In June 2020 it turned out: He couldn't.

Public prosecutors and members of the Bundestag in a parliamentary committee of inquiry have since tried to legally deal with the billion-dollar disaster.

But ex-board member Jan Marsalek is still on the run, most recently suspected of being in Moscow.

My colleagues from the business editorial team have

prepared

a

chronology of the scandal

for you

in SPIEGEL articles

.

You can find the dossier on our homepage today.

In the

new SPIEGEL,

the digital edition of which is due out today at noon, you will also find a report on the auditing company EY, whose sloppiness contributed to the fact that the scandalous company was able to last for so long.

• Billion bluff, espionage thriller, political affair: the SPIEGEL cover story on the Wirecard case (issue 03/2020)

When the BKA rings twice

Federal Finance Minister and SPD candidate for Chancellor

Olaf Scholz and his wife Britta Ernst have moved

- in itself, such a private matter would not be worth reporting to SPIEGEL.

But his new

neighbors in Potsdam are mad at Scholz

, more precisely at his security guards, report Christoph Schult and Gerald Traufetter.

At first, the neighbors were proud and flattered that a minister was moving in with them, it is said. "Yes, the Vice Chancellor, Mama!" But the joy has evaporated because a Vice Chancellor rarely comes alone: ​​Since Scholz is classified in the highest security level, police officers have been patrolling the property ever since. "Residents of the house are observed crossing the courtyard and even escorted to the front door," complained the housing management in a letter to the local police headquarters.

The latest escalation:

The housing management even forbade the police from entering the property because the residents felt disturbed by the security measures.

Maybe Scholz should just go from door to door and introduce himself to the neighborhood in person?

With a mask, of course.

• Tenant annoyance of the SPD chancellor candidate: Olaf Scholz has already lost with his neighbors

Loser of the day ...

... are

the more than 59 million voters in Iran

who are theoretically allowed to exercise their basic democratic right today to elect a successor to President Hassan Rouhani. Although they have the choice between five candidates on paper (the female form can be omitted here), one of them has long been considered the winner: the 61-year-old arch-conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi. He has a good chance of later rising from the presidential post to the leader of the revolution, that is to say to the most powerful man in Iran.

All opponents who were dangerous to him were sorted out in good time, as my colleague Christiane Hoffmann recently described.

That is why many millions of Iranians would boycott this election, "the most important one since the 1979 revolution," out of frustration, said Hoffmann.

In the past, the regime would at least have kept appearances and tried to get a high turnout.

But that's over.

“The hardliners don't need the people anymore.

The only important thing is that your candidate wins. "

The latest news from the night

• World Medical Association warns of the rapid spread of the Delta variant in Germany:

  "Very high viral load in the throat": According to the World Medical Association, the delta mutant of the coronavirus is likely to spread rapidly in Germany.

  Boss Frank Ulrich Montgomery therefore calls for a review of the easing

• The end of slavery is now an official US holiday:

  It is a matter of remembering the "moral blot" and "America's original sin": US President Joe Biden has signed a law giving the country its twelfth public holiday

• Podolski denies statement by FC President Wolf:

  At the general meeting of 1. FC Köln, President Werner Wolf also spoke about Lukas Podolski's future.

  The player corrected it immediately via Twitter

The SPIEGEL + recommendations for today

• Lawyer on pandemic control: "In case of doubt, freedom must take precedence"

• Substitute teacher in homeschooling: This year we parents should write the certificates

• Hunger in North Korea: Why Kim Jong Un prepares his people for difficult times

• Fear of inflation: Hui Buh, the inflation specter

I wish you a good start to the day.

Your Melanie Amann