The situation in the morning: does Olaf Scholz promise too much?

I hope you had a relaxing and inspiring few days at Christmas.

Here are the issues that matter today.

Dangerous promises

Olaf Scholz reminds me of Jens Spahn on one point: He tends to set brave goals, to make promises, by which he has to be measured.

There is one difference, however. Scholz tries to back up his noble goals

. At Spahn, the announcements often seemed spontaneous and ill-conceived, such as the announcement in mid-February that there would be free quick tests for everyone from March 1st. At the time, the federal states were completely surprised by the ambition of the health minister, and so it took a few days longer before this test offer was actually available.

Now, however, Scholz also has to correct one of his goals.

Originally, the Chancellery had expected to achieve a vaccination rate of 80 percent - based on initial vaccinations - by the next federal-state round on January 7th.

According to the Robert Koch Institute (as of December 27), it is currently 73.8 percent, so it would be an ambitious project.

The goal has therefore now been largely silently postponed to the end of January.

On the one hand, it is great when a Federal Chancellor sets himself clear and ambitious goals.

If they are broken or postponed too often, however, it tarnishes the credibility.

In fact, the vaccination campaign, which is celebrating its first birthday today, is currently rather sluggish.

On Christmas Day, 35,000 vaccine doses were administered across Germany.

On Christmas Eve there were around 68,000, which is a fraction of what was done a week earlier: the number of daily vaccinations was sometimes over a million.

The announcement by the Chancellor last Tuesday that the vaccination campaign "will continue with undiminished vigor even during the holidays, between the years and at the beginning of the new year" is still waiting to be fulfilled.

Most of the doctors seem to be on Christmas

vacation instead of keeping the practices open to those willing to vaccinate.

There are notable exceptions, such as the neurologist Ahmad-Mujtaba Mostakiem from Duisburg.

Until this evening at 6 p.m. he will be completing a vaccination marathon: Together with 15 employees, he will then have offered vaccinations in a three-shift system for 81 hours in a hotel without an appointment - while the municipal vaccination center next door was closed over the holidays .

It is such initiatives that the country needs now.

There is also good news for the vaccination anniversary:

, and for the vast majority of those vaccinated there were no problems.

Side effects can be reported to the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI). According to statistics, 1.6 suspected cases per 1000 vaccine doses were reported to the PEI in around 123 million vaccinations by the end of November, which corresponds to 0.16 percent.

If only the serious reactions are considered, the reporting rate is 0.2 suspected cases per 1000 vaccine doses.

According to the safety report, suspected deaths following vaccination were reported in 1919.

But only in 78 individual cases did the PEI »evaluate the causal connection with the vaccination as possible or probable«.

78 cases out of 123 million vaccinations: even if every death is tragic and regrettable, this number is

from a statistical point of view

.

Yesterday the federal government celebrated that its goal of inoculating 30 million doses by the end of the year had already been achieved.

Whether this is actually the case depends on how you calculate.

• Here are some number games

Loud and small

Today the opponents of the state corona measures are marching again in many cities, especially in eastern Germany.

As cynical as it is, they tie in with the tradition of the Monday demonstrations, which played a key role in the peaceful turnaround in 1989.

Pegida also hijacked this historical form of protest unrestrainedly.

The demonstrators will find mentions in the media - including at SPIEGEL - which in turn will lead to a lot of criticism of the media: Do you have to give these people a platform? We are asked again and again about such reports.

The answer is: yes, we have to.

if one wants to depict political debates and social currents as they are.

However, I found a number from the news agencies reassuring: According to this, around 17,000 people across Germany took part in demonstrations against the corona policy of the federal and state governments in more than 20 cities last Monday.

That's an average of 850 people per demo.

Since every protester-experienced unionist wrestles a compassionate smile.

The protests are loud, but they are also very small.

• Why a judge in Thuringia tries to ban the veil to keep his hearing room mask-free.

Putin's trauma

A special on television announced the end: On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed his people, "for the last time as President," as he said.

In the evening the Soviet flag was withdrawn from the Kremlin,

.

A good two weeks earlier, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus had signed a treaty to dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

On December 21, a majority of former republics agreed to form the "Commonwealth of Independent States".

A world empire came to an end that had significantly helped to end the Nazi era in Germany, which had sent the first man into space in 1961 and which the United States had regarded as a dreaded opposing power for decades.

Did the end come as a surprise?

In a look back 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, my colleague Uwe Klußmann recalls that the breaks in this gigantic power structure were recognizable early on:

But as early as 1922, the year the Soviet Union was founded, a Russian politician had warned how fragile this state was.

"The whole machinery is going to fall apart."

At a Russian Communist party congress, he said that the government must "correctly express what the people recognize".

Because "otherwise the Communist Party will not lead the proletariat and the proletariat will not lead the masses, and the whole machine will fall apart".

The speaker's name was Vladimir Ulyanov, known as Lenin.

As early as March 1922, the founder of the state and party leader named a basic problem of the Soviet government: “The steering wheel slips away from your hands: It seems that a person is sitting there driving the car, but the car does not go where he is going, but where someone else is going directs him. "

The decline of the Soviet Empire, however, continues to this day, and not for the better.

Vladimir Putin is fighting for Russia's position of power on the border with Ukraine; he is undoubtedly shaped by the trauma of the fall.

Putin said in 2005 that the end of the Soviet Union would be the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. And in a television documentary on Russian state television, he recalled that Russia had lost 40 percent of its historical territory at the time. "It's as if he wanted to show us that the collapse of the Soviet Union is not yet over, it is an open-ended process," writes my colleague and Moscow SPIEGEL correspondent Christian Esch in an essay.

The conclusions that the Russian President draws from this experience, however, are ahistorical and illusory.

In the end, he not only demanded assurances that the Ukraine would not join NATO and that the stationing of modern Western weapons systems would be prohibited there, but also called for a de facto deconstruction of NATO to the state it had before the eastward expansion in 1997: a stationing of more western ones Troops in the states of the former Warsaw Pact would be excluded.

Yesterday Putin repeated his demands and combined them with an implied threat.

If the negotiations on binding security guarantees fail, Russia's response will

depend

says the Russian President.

At the same time, there are signs of relaxation:

Russia sent 10,000 soldiers from the border back to the barracks.

And last week, not only did Olaf Scholz and Vladimir Putin talk on the phone, but also the Chancellor's foreign policy advisor, Jens Plötner, and the Russian Commissioner for Ukraine, Dmitri Kosak, exchanged views.

There will probably be face-to-face meetings at the beginning of January.

Germany could play an important role in resolving the conflict.

It would be the first major foreign policy challenge for the new Chancellor.

• You can read Uwe Klußmann's review here

Epilogue of the day ...

If you look at the many film clips

that are now being shown

about the death of the former Archbishop of Cape Town,

, it becomes clear what a man with a mission is.

As long as his health was in a position to do so, Desmond Mpilo Tutu fought for the rights of the oppressed and forgotten, with sharpness, harshness and yet never-ending happiness.

Until the end he, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was always close to the people, even if it was collecting rubbish together on a dusty street in some village.

With Nelson Mandela, the bishop was instrumental in driving political and, above all, peaceful change in South Africa and overcoming apartheid.

But he was also not afraid to sarcastically attack his own people from the African National Congress (ANC) when allegations of corruption and abuse of office arose.

"Our government is worse than the apartheid government," Tutu said at the time.

"At least one expected bad things from her."

Desmond Tutu was 90 years old.

It is like so often: only when they are no longer there do you notice how much people like him are missing in this world.

I highly recommend that you read the very personal, very moving, very readable obituary of my colleague and long-time Africa correspondent Bartholomäus Grill on Desmond Tutu.

• On the death of Desmond Tutu: Hamba bald, Arch - Adieu, great old man!

The latest news from the night

• Woman kills boyfriend with sword:

  A couple in Missouri took methamphetamine together.

  Then the woman attacked her friend with the sword and killed him - to free him, as she stated

• Escaped prisoner from France arrested in Düsseldorf:

  A 28-year-old alleged murderer had faked a suicide attempt and fled a hospital near Paris with the help of an accomplice.

  Now the German police have caught the two in Düsseldorf

• Two dams broken in Brazil:

  it has been raining in northeastern Brazil for almost two months.

  Because of the storm, two dams broke in the state of Bahia.

  400,000 people are affected by the floods

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I wish you a good start into the day and into the last week of this year.

Your Martin Knobbe