FRiedrich Merz sits in the mountain rescue service. A room of perhaps 40 square meters with light wood furniture. On the tables there are plates with freshly filled roll halves, on a coffee cup you can see the face of a bearded old man with a felt hat, underneath it says “Alpenmax – original Jagatee”. The drink is an Austrian specialty. But Austria and the Alps are hundreds of kilometers away. Instead, the Ruhr rises just a few minutes away by car.
It's Saturday morning, nine o'clock, and the CDU chairman is listening to the men from the mountain rescue team tell him how they help skiers who have had accidents. Because Merz has a ski resort in his constituency in Hochsauerland. The man who belongs to the small circle of politicians who have a chance of becoming the next Chancellor must, like every member of the Bundestag, care about the region in which he lives and through which he is elected. The ski area in Winterberg is less than 1000 meters high, but offers 27 kilometers of connected slopes.
A politician and his staff can prepare such visits well. It can be planned that Merz will arrive on time for the Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Championships currently taking place in Winterberg. Not even the CDU chairman's team can prepare for the fact that it will start to snow this Saturday. Lucky. But the men from the mountain rescue service don't just want to eat sandwiches with Merz and show him their equipment. You have a specific request for the politician who otherwise argues with the Chancellor in Berlin about Taurus cruise missiles for Ukraine or is received in Israel by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It's about financing the mountain rescue service in North Rhine-Westphalia. Chancellor's ambitions or not: This is a real problem for the men in his constituency and for the attractiveness of tourism in Winterberg.
Politicians who mainly work in Berlin like to point out that normal life takes place in the constituency, unlike in the “Berlin bubble”. Merz said last summer: “Kreuzberg is not Germany, Gillamoos is Germany.” He wanted to make himself popular as a guest at the Lower Bavarian beer tent fun, where the CSU riots rhetorically every year. For city dwellers it sounded pretty unfriendly. So they were allowed to feel like they didn't belong to Germany.
Merz has been holding back for some time with such sayings, which provoke some people, but which others consider to be effective in advertising, because the impression is created that Merz speaks the way many people do. Unlike CSU chairman Markus Söder, who seems to think about which slogan he wants to dominate the headlines with in the morning, Merz gives the impression that he says such sayings in public in exactly the same way that he doesn't do it in public. He just knocks them out. Some fear that this could happen again in the future.
Normal life should now be normal in the Hochsauerland district, not that of Berlin. Merz experienced how closely the two are connected during his visit to the mountain rescue service. North Rhine-Westphalia is the only German state in which an injured person has to pay for mountain rescue services themselves because it is not covered by health insurance. The men from the mountain rescue service no longer want to put tourists through this. They are hoping for support from distinguished visitors from Berlin.
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