Corona failure: Markus Söder from the Maulheld team

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CSU boss Söder

Photo: Peter Kneffel / DPA

Last Sunday, an Air Force Airbus landed at Helmut Schmidt Airport in Hamburg.

The machine came from Munich, it brought seriously ill corona patients.

Bavaria's intensive care units capitulated before the fourth wave, there is apparently hardly any free capacity in the Free State, Hamburg, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate are helping.

Last weekend alone, 29 Bavarian patients were admitted by federal states to which Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder usually feels vastly superior.

I saw the TV pictures of the relief operation on the news. You end the show of the self-proclaimed Corona muscle man Söder. We experience the failure of the CSU boss and Bavarian Prime Minister on the open stage.

Söder has long presented himself as a doer who keeps the virus in check with a hard hand and explains to the hesitant, the unsuspecting, the Hallodris in the rest of the republic what they are doing wrong. In doing so, he tried to deceive the public. In truth, Bavaria was a Corona worry country. Söder often got the situation worse under control than most of his counterparts. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, he conjured up the risk of infection for the elderly. Strangely enough, the death rate in the Free State was still 100 percent above the national average in the first few months, also because of larger outbreaks in nursing homes. In the summer of 2020 there were unbelievable breakdowns in Bavarian test centers. Hundreds of infected people could not be informed for days.

For a long time, Söder had a reputation as a successful crisis manager, especially when compared to Armin Laschet, the then Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Team caution beats team risk, that was the impression that Laschet might not have used later in the Bundestag election campaign.

In truth, Bavaria was not better off than North Rhine-Westphalia in terms of important corona indicators, but often worse.

To date, 8.8 percent of Bavarians have demonstrably been infected with the virus, only Saxony and Thuringia have been hit harder.

A good 1.3 per thousand of the Bavarian population died of or with Corona, a sad peak value among the western federal states.

On the other hand, the proportion of people vaccinated in Bavaria is particularly low at less than 70 percent.

The vaccination campaigns did not even convince all FC Bayern Munich footballers.

Most recently, Söder blamed the future traffic light coalition in Berlin for the bad situation.

But he can't get away with it anymore.

The pictures of the Bundeswehr machines are too strong.

Bavaria is a disaster area, Söder has lost control.

He's not Team Caution, but Team Maulheld.