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“Autistic” Scholz, “Neuter” Merkel: The tone in federal politics is becoming very shrill. Now things are getting rougher within the traffic light coalition too.
Berlin – The story of the Smurf shows that Olaf Scholz usually handles insults quite confidently. It was 2021, when the SPD man was just about to become a candidate for chancellor, when CSU leader Markus Söder barked at him, saying that he didn’t need to “grin around like that”. Smurfy? A little blue dwarf with a bulbous nose? Instead of being insulted, Scholz later philosophized on television that he thought it was “great – they’re small, cunning and always win”. At his next appearance in Munich, he even held up a small plastic Smurf to the cameras.
Later, when he was already in office, Scholz brushed off Merz’s accusation of being a “plumber of power” by pointing out how valuable the craft was. He sat through other things, such as insults from a former Ukrainian ambassador, without saying a word. The Chancellor has practice, then. “I’m one of those people who can put up with it when others get a bit rough,” he once said. But now things are really getting shrill. Members of his own coalition say that Scholz has a medical condition – he is “autistic.”
Scholz as a “blatant know-it-all”: Strack-Zimmermann causes an affront
It comes from the FDP politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who heads the Defence Committee in the Bundestag and is now running for Europe. In an interview with New Osnabrück Newspaper she said of Scholz: “After three years, I have noticed that he has almost autistic traits, both in terms of his social contacts in politics and his inability to explain his actions to the citizens.” And she continued: “This affects all issues and is also confirmed to me by his party colleagues. You can’t reach him because he is a blatant know-it-all.”
In a coalition, this is an extreme affront. Especially since the democratic parties recently gave themselves a kind of code of conduct for the upcoming election campaigns. The SPD leadership has been very harsh in its criticism of Strack-Zimmermann. “People shout and insult each other in talk shows. And now we are also seeing the pathologisation of their competitors,” says Katarina Barley, who is running for the SPD in the European elections. A red line has been crossed here. The SPD would rather paint a picture of the chancellor as a man who thinks things through and then acts prudently.
Heavy criticism of Strack-Zimmermann – but SPD General Secretary Kühnert is also angry
Secretary General Kevin Kühnert also calls this disrespectful. And sees a system behind it: “It has long been a method for Ms Strack-Zimmermann to attack other opinions with the help of strong language.” If she really is elected to the EU Parliament, she will “not be beneficial to the reputation of the Federal Republic.”
However, Kühnert himself is also in trouble because of a misleading statement in an interview. Last week he said that with Scholz, “there is finally no longer a neutral figure in the Chancellery.” This was of course to be understood as criticism of Angela Merkel (CDU). Whether it was a “misogynistic slip-up,” as the CDU complains, or was aimed at a lack of political decisions is debatable.
One thing is clear: the climate in Berlin is disturbed, and has long been the case in the traffic light coalition. But this has happened in coalitions before. In 2010, the former partners CSU and FDP called each other “a bunch of idiots,” “quarter-nuts,” and “wild boar” politicians in “ancient Roman Caesar madness.” (Christian Deutschländer)
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