Criticism “Hard but fair”: Unstructured election review

Wichtige Wahlen lassen Talkshow-Moderatoren keine Wahl: Natürlich muss es in der nächsten Sendung um die Ursachen des Ergebnisses und seine politischen Folgen gehen. Caren Miosga hatte ihre am Sonntagabend denn auch schlicht „Nach den Landtagswahlen“ betitelt. Louis Klamroth wurde bei „Hart aber fair“ einen Tag später nur unwesentlich konkreter: „Triumph für AfD und BSW: Wie verändern diese Wahlen das Land?“

Nicht weniger als acht Gäste waren in Klamroths Sendung gekommen – fast mochte man sich fragen, ob er vielleicht von der Zahl an Zusagen überrascht worden war. Die ersten fünfzehn Minuten konfrontierte er Beatrix von Storch (AfD) mit der Wirtschaftsweisen Veronika Grimm. Der Bezug zu den Wahlen war hier marginal, vor allem wollte Klamroth wohl die Wirtschaftspolitik der AfD entlarven.

Dazu hätte er jedoch besser einfach seine beiden Gäste miteinander diskutieren lassen – anstatt von Storch gleich beim ersten Satz zu unterbrechen, sich Scharmützel mit ihr über die Parteizugehörigkeit des Edeka-Vorsitzenden zu liefern, alle ihre Aussagen dreimal zu hinterfragen, die Argumente Grimms aber gleichsam als objektive Wahrheiten dastehen zu lassen.

Once again, viewers are left wondering how talk shows should best deal with the radicals in German politics. The staging of “Everyone against the AfD”, underlined by the audience’s applause at the politically correct point, certainly does not seem to be the right approach for such formats.

After this introduction, three politicians and journalists were each allowed to share their views on the election results. Here, too, for a long time, you hardly heard anything that you hadn’t heard dozens of times before: some find the results shocking, others expected them and are more shocked at how shocked the others are. The influence of federal politics on the state elections is disputed in some quarters and regretted in others. The AfD is successful because the other parties fail to recognize the real concerns of the people.

An empirical election analysis would have been much more informative. At least Karl Lauterbach was able to gain a few sympathy points with his characteristic verve, so that one could even believe that he actually considers Olaf Scholz to be the best chancellor of all time.

Things only became more concrete and therefore more interesting when the last part of the program turned to the formation of a coalition in Thuringia. Thorsten Frei tried hard to justify the incompatibility decision of the CDU and the Left Party, but was hardly able to convince anyone in the group that Bodo Ramelow was more dangerous than Sarah Wagenknecht. Christian Leye from the BSW, on the other hand, had to explain how he wanted to make foreign policy a condition of a state coalition. According to the journalistic assessment, it would probably amount to a declaration of intent in the preamble with no consequences.

Here, as so often, it became clear that a stronger focus would have done the talk show good. The idea of ​​creating a forum for political discourse on television is undoubtedly a good one. But in order for the “informal compulsion of the better argument” to take effect there, or at least in the minds of the viewers, such arguments would first have to be systematically presented and exchanged.

Instead, presenters all too often just let their guests say whatever comes to mind on a broad topic. Perhaps viewers should console themselves with the fact that there are certainly much more low-brow ways to spend their evening. However, this does not fulfill the democratic potential of a talk show like “Hart aber fair”.