As of: March 5, 2024, 5:30 p.m
By: Georg Anastasiadis
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz is heavily criticized for his rejection of the Taurus delivery to Ukraine.
A comment from Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.
© Silas Stein/dpa/Klaus Haag
The Chancellor is receiving increasing criticism for his rejection of the Taurus delivery to Ukraine.
But Olaf Scholz doesn’t challenge that.
He has other goals that have more to do with his re-election than with defending himself against Putin's attack.
A comment by Georg Anastasiadis.
Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron will no longer be friends in this politician's life.
As soon as the Chancellor had said his basta about the Taurus delivery - "I am the Chancellor, and that's why this applies" - the French President countered with the sentence that as an ally of Ukraine you should now "not be a coward".
That sounds only slightly friendlier than what the Chancellor heard from Moscow the day before.
And domestically there are also signs of a lot of trouble for Scholz.
Bundestag Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki now predicted in our newspaper that at least a dozen FDP MPs would abandon the Chancellor's banner in the Bundestag in the next Taurus vote.
No wonder that the CDU and CSU immediately gratefully accepted this invitation.
Scholz is in a multi-front cold war: blackmailed by Putin, mocked by Macron
This means that Scholz is in the middle of a multi-front cold war: blackmailed by Putin, mocked by Macron, openly challenged by the coalition partner FDP and all on the very day on which he expressly invoked his policymaking authority as Chancellor when saying no to the Taurus (It was only his second traffic light power word after the turn of the century; with his first he had instructed his Green Climate Minister Robert Habeck to let the last three nuclear reactors run for three months longer).
The Union, which more or less openly accuses Scholz of lying, is the smallest problem.
However, the head of government will still have to give an account of how he came to the claim that German soldiers are needed in Ukraine to operate the Taurus, when his top military officials and the Taurus manufacturer claim the opposite.
Apparently none of this bothers the Chancellor anymore.
He has decided to make the mighty Taurus his weapon - not to defend Ukraine, but to defend his chancellery in the next federal election.
George Anastasiadis