The future Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has spoken out in favor of a general vaccination requirement in order to free Germany from the corona pandemic in the medium term.
The FDP top politicians Michael Theurer and Marco Buschmann categorically rejected this goal and warned against "state violence" against vaccinators.
Oh no, wait a minute.
It's not like that at all.
The liberals will in future be part of the federal government, and are therefore now also open to positions
for which the FDP had previously almost feared a party expulsion process
.
This week, of all people, it was Buschmann, the designated Federal Minister of Justice, who even before Olaf Scholz showed the way to compulsory vaccination and pleaded for a vote in the Bundestag on this issue as a question of conscience for all MPs.
Pandemic times are difficult times for liberals, or at least when they take on responsibility.
My colleague Severin Weiland describes it as a "trip into reality".
From the opposition bank you can easily go to the Federal Constitutional Court against a curfew, but then suddenly you have to look for the gentlest possible ways to force all Germans to vaccinate on the government bank.
The changeover seems to me to be particularly difficult for legal politician Buschmann
, who has had to correct himself several times on his way from opposition politician to member of government on Corona issues.
Malice is not appropriate here, because to govern means having to vacate rock-solid positions in times of need and as a person in charge.
It is only regrettable that the pandemic is about more than the abolition of the Soli or the reform of the inheritance tax.
Here the rather slow process of rethinking in the ranks of the liberals is at the expense of the nursing staff and of course those suffering from corona.
Who is in charge here?
The future federal government will set up a crisis team in the Chancellery under the direction of a Bundeswehr general.
With the soldier Carsten Breuer, all threads for fighting the virus should come together at the federal and state level.
The Green Party leaders sharply criticized this plan and warned of the danger of a militaristic pandemic policy.
Oh no, wait a minute.
It's not like that at all.
The Greens are no longer the opposition, but soon part of the government and therefore also
for
the General in the Chancellery.
We are really experiencing an upside-down political world these days.
I always understood that the Greens are skeptical of any kind of influence by high-ranking military officials on fundamental political decisions in German domestic politics.
On an apparently hopelessly outdated page of the Greens parliamentary group, it says: "We demand that civilian crisis prevention be placed at the center of German foreign policy." When it comes to the heart of German domestic policy, one is now obviously less painful.
I confess that the idea of a man in uniform in the cabinet room, who with a steadfast eye and a hard hand takes over the reins from the democratically legitimized government, is not very reassuring for me.
Just as little as the pride and relief in the voices of Olaf Scholz and Christian Lindner that a general, ONE GENERAL, will now defeat the virus for us.
Finally someone who can lead, they seem to be saying.
But didn't Olaf Scholz want to lead himself?
With words, of course?
A first step might be
a kind of blood-sweat-tears speech
like the one given by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Admittedly, Scholz is not a gifted speaker.
Couldn't Robert Habeck write the speech for Scholz, Lindner deliver it and then answer Scholz's questions?
So every traffic light representative would have played out his strengths.
Seriously, I definitely don't want to question Breuer's qualification as a crisis manager, which my colleague Matthias Gebauer has already described: He managed difficult missions and organized the Bundeswehr's Corona deployment.
Portuguese and Italians also have successful corona generals.
But since when have people in Germany been looking for successful management methods in the direction of the armed forces?
Isn't that this troop, about which one has only read attributes such as "ailing", "broken down", "demoralized" in recent years?
At least from the FDP, I would have expected the party to look in the direction of the private sector, where good management does not work in a military command structure, but with smart digital solutions and intelligent performance incentives.
One would have thought that the Liberals would advocate a management consultant, or a top manager, as in the UK.
But well, Christian Lindner is also a reserve officer.
Ultimately, I can only interpret Breuer's choice this way: The situation is right, right, really desperate.
One of the experts' advice from virologists, pedagogues, intensive care physicians, etc. seems even more sensible - although it would have been enough to simply implement the advice that these experts have been sending desperately into the black hole of political Berlin for months.
And the idea that "all opinions" will have their say in the future council does not give rise to hope.
By the time opposing virologists have agreed on a unified line to fight pandemic, General Breuer may have burst his collar tab and he'd rather take action.
Hopefully he will ask Olaf Scholz's permission beforehand.
What the polls say
The prospect of the Chancellery is apparently good for the Social Democrats.
In the Sunday question, the SPD is a week before Olaf Scholz's planned accession to government with 26 percent.
The Union parties have grown steadily in the weeks since the federal election, now reaching 24 percent.
This was the result of a survey by the opinion research institute Civey for SPIEGEL.
The losses at the FDP, which may correspond to the gains in the Union, are interesting: the Liberals currently still achieve 11 percent.
What the Union has gained in the polls since the end of October, the FDP seems to lose accordingly.
And otherwise?
The Greens are stable at 15 percent, the AfD on par with the FDP and the Left, you know, sticks to the five percent mark.
The constituency of the week: # 70
She has been sitting in the Bundestag for almost 20 years with interruptions, and yet the future Federal Environment Minister is still unknown to many Germans.
The
Greens Steffi Lemke
not only has experience as an environmental politician and thus occupies a core topic of her party, she is also very well networked there as the former federal executive director of the Greens.
And as a woman, left-wing party and East German, she fulfills several quotas at the same time, with the fulfillment of which the Green leadership had its difficulties in the end.
Lemke's birthplace and political home is
Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt
.
In this green diaspora, the election results of the direct candidate Lemke were mostly in the lower single-digit range, but as the top candidate for Saxony-Anhalt she made it into the Bundestag via the state list of the Greens.
Your victorious rival candidate in the constituency is called
Sepp Müller and comes from the CDU
.
Müller, born in the turning point of 1989, is likely to be even more unknown in the federal government than Lemke, but recently made headlines with an angry speech in the Bundestag: Müller had been infected with corona despite vaccination and booster and refused to be instrumentalized by an AfD MP for vaccine-skeptical sayings to become.
"Thank God I was vaccinated," shouted Müller, "my nose just ran." A very sporty and healthy friend of his, on the other hand, can hardly go up the stairs after a corona infection without a vaccination.
The AfD competition in the constituency of Lemke and Müller is strong: In the last two elections, the respective candidate landed at 19 and 22 percent respectively.
Who knows, in the next attempt, the Greens could benefit from their official bonus as Environment Minister.
The social media moment of the week
You have heard and read it so often, and yet the idea is still unusual after 16 years: Angela Merkel will be leaving office in a few days and will only be a citizen.
I'm excited to see the first pictures of Angela Merkel shopping, strolling around, maybe eating in a restaurant (depending on what the pandemic allows), then without the typical pants suit and professionally styled hairstyle.
The Chancellor shopping remains a curiosity, as recently in the Tiktok video of a user who spotted Merkel in a Nike outlet store.
The Chancellor paced up and down a wall of white sneakers.
The appearance reminded me of the "Germany Day" of the CDU youth party Junge Union, where white sneakers seemed to be part of the party uniform and were given away to the public.
Should this memory have inspired Merkel for Christmas?
In any case, your security officers should accompany the ex-Chancellor for a while while shopping.
The stories of the week
I would particularly like to recommend these politically relevant stories from our capital city office to you:
Podcast SPIEGEL Daily: Why is Germany a paradise for money launderers?
Parity in politics: why women's quotas are not a solution either
New study: right-wing populists on the rise due to Corona
Heartfelt,
Your Melanie Amann
And once again the note on our own behalf: You can order this briefing here as a newsletter in your e-mail inbox.
