Today is about the last hours of Angela Merkel as Chancellor and the first day of Olaf Scholz.
How does it go - and does the "Chancellor's mat" find the right tone?
The new Ukraine conflict is putting the traffic lights under pressure in matters of Nord Stream 2. And: What we know about Omikron so far.
Bye Chancellor, moin Chancellor
It is traffic light day: Germany has
a
new Chancellor in
Olaf Scholz
.
You will have to get used to the masculine in this context:
Angela Merkel
, the Chancellor, is
stepping down after 16 years in power
.
She defined a political era and accomplished the feat of being more popular in the country, even in their most unpopular days, than many European leaders were in their most popular times.
Her long tenure alone shows that she understood what the majority of Germans wanted.
Merkel was always a moderating and stabilizing force, only rarely a creative one.
It stood for stability - that was possibly the only truly conservative thing about it - and it became a synonym for Germany out there in the world.
My SPIEGEL colleague Dirk Kurbjuweit, who has accompanied and observed Merkel for longer than anyone else in our editorial team, recently took stock of Merkel's tenure as the cover story: “All in all, her era deserves the title of
Preservation Chancellor
. Despite the crises and catastrophes, Germany is in reasonably good shape, and prosperity has been largely defended. Under the impression of the crises, one must not forget that most Germans had a comparatively good life in Merkel's chancellorship for many years. "And yet he comes to the conclusion that she had made too little of her opportunities:
" What started out big with her, almost always ended in faint-heartedness. "
Merkel was a
projection screen
at home and abroad
: Liberal Americans saw in her the leader of the West, whom she never wanted to be, many French saw in her unpretentious way of exercising power a refreshing contrast to their own presidents. And many leftists wanted to take them over as feminists in their last years, they too are now saying the sentence "We will still miss them," as columnist Margarete Stokowski observes uncomprehendingly. As former Chancellor Merkel is now moving her office to the Bundestag building at Unter den Linden 71, where GDR education minister Margot Honecker once had her official residence.
Today what
is called
"peaceful transition of power"
in English
is the democratic transfer of power.
The fact that it can be emphasized how problem-free it is in Germany also says something about our time: What was once a matter of course in Western democracies has unfortunately not been since the former US President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the US election .
In Germany, the almost-no-longer-chancellor and soon-to-be-chancellor demonstratively demonstrate the opposite: They even appeared as a duo at the G20 summit in Rome.
Merkel's Chancellorship: The era of missed opportunities
Can Scholz do more than chancellor mat?
The election of Chancellor will take place today at 9 a.m. in the Reichstag
, and Olaf Scholz's swearing-in ceremony will take place at noon.
If you don't want to miss the important moments, you can
watch
them
live
on spiegel.de today
.
The new federal government is to be announced at 1.30 p.m. and the ministers are to be sworn in.
Today nobody can say how long Olaf Scholz will be Chancellor -
will the traffic light be a long-term or a short-lived alliance?
It is also difficult to imagine how Scholz will exercise the office.
He will have to show that he is more than an even more taciturn Merkel - and he must be measured by whether he and his traffic light coalition
can really deliver
the promised renewal of the country
.
The danger is not small that the opposing alliance blocks one another or breaks due to its differences. And yet there are high hopes that after years of preservation, years of design will come.
Scholz himself still has to grow into the role
: his way of reacting to unpleasant questions in such a way that he simply tells something completely different may have been funny at times as the mayor of Hamburg. But citizens expect more from a chancellor.
As for evidence, colleague Jonas Schaible reports on an enigmatic appearance by Scholz at yesterday's federal press conference: Scholz hardly gave an answer to a question even remotely.
When asked whether it was true that he had a conversation with China's President Xi Jinping and promised to influence his coalition partners who are more critical of China, Scholz said with a smile: ›I haven't had a bilateral conversation that I have talked about in the newspaper "The fact that Scholz did not want to answer shows that there must be some truth in the report that he had promised Xi a continuation of Merkel's China policy.
First appearance of the traffic light tips: The government speaks in riddles
Will Germany stop Nord Stream 2?
The impression is solidifying that, in view of the crisis in the world,
there is still no traffic light foreign policy
.
It remains unclear whether Germany will join the
US diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in China
.
In response to the question, Scholz said nothing at all several times, from which one can conclude that there is no consensus on this.
There will certainly be even more crunch between the “value-based” foreign policy postulated by the Greens in the coalition agreement and the SPD Chancellor's Hamburg foreign trade policy.
A coalition dispute could soon
arise
over
the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea
pipeline
, given the
risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine
: the Greens and FDP are critical of the project anyway, but the SPD is involved in the history of this pipeline from Schröder to Gabriel to Schwesig , which Putin is now openly using as a geopolitical power tool. There is a strong group of senators in the US Senate who want to impose new sanctions on Nord Stream 2. Reuters reported after Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin's video meeting yesterday that Germany has agreed to end the pipeline project if Russia really does start an invasion of Ukraine. Again, there is no official confirmation - and yes, that can get very interesting.
Putin pushed through yesterday's video summit with Biden by stirring up war fears against Ukraine
.
Biden is said to have threatened massive economic sanctions against Russia.
Read more about it here:
Video summit between Biden and Putin: "Good to see you again"
The Omicron Virus Prediction: Severe to Mild
"Delta will be our problem until January, Omikron into summer."
This sobering virus forecast comes from Professor
Christian Drosten
, who gave a coronavirus update on the NDR podcast.
But what can we expect from Omikron? The greatest optimists hope that the variant, which appears to be so highly contagious that
the number of infected people doubles within three to four days
, is also milder - in the best case scenario, the pandemic could slowly turn into endemic. But it is probably not that simple. In South Africa currently available scientific results indicate a lower disease severity, however large parts of the local population have already been infected with corona several times. Drosten: "We are dealing here with a perfect post-pandemic virus, with a perfect first endemic virus", but Germany is not yet ready for a "post-infection" because of the low level of immunity.
Drosten warns against premature optimism: »It could be that the severity of the disease is not only not reduced.
It could even be that it is made more difficult, the severity of the disease. "
Because the virus multiplication at Omikron is much stronger: "A lot of virus, a lot of disease," he said.
A somewhat more optimistic assessment is made by
Dr.
Anthony Fauci
, Joe Biden's Corona chief advisor:
Omikron "almost certainly" doesn't make you more ill than Delta
, he said.
One thing seems clear: Omikron will come over us so quickly that there is very little time for political action.
New corona variant: when do we know the danger of Omikron?
Loser of the day ...
... is
Mohammed bin Salman
, MbS for short, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Well, some readers might ask themselves: Wasn't he the “winner of the day” just yesterday, because French President Emmanuel Macron rehabilitated him, so to speak, with a visit to the circle of state leaders, three years after a Saudi kill team saw the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul brutally?
The observation is correct, but there is a reason for the reappearance of MbS in this section: French police officers arrested a man yesterday at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, of all places, who is said to have been involved in the killing of Khashoggi in Istanbul: Khaled Aedh Al- Otaibi.
He belonged to the royal guard and is said to be a close confidante and personal security officer of MbS.
Why he felt so sure he was flying around under his real name remains his secret.
But now, of all things, French police officers have ensured that Macron's rehabilitation of MbS is massively disrupted - the arrest of the suspect could lead to even greater diplomatic upheaval in the coming days.
The latest news from the night
Australia is also boycotting the Winter Olympics diplomatically:
the USA had submitted - now the Australian government has also announced that it will not send diplomats to the Winter Olympics in China.
According to Canberra, the reason is "disagreements"
Biontech vaccine may only partially protect against infection with Omikron:
According to South African researchers, the new corona variant can partially bypass the protective effect of the Biontech vaccine.
Lobortests have shown a decrease in antibodies
Trump's ex-chief of staff does not want to cooperate with the investigative body:
Despite a subpoena, Mark Meadows has announced that he will not speak to the congressional committee about the attack on the Capitol.
Now President Trump's former chief of staff is threatened with indictment
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I wish you a good start to the day.
Sincerely,
Mathieu von Rohr
