The chancellor and her successor agree with regional leaders to extend restrictions nationwide
Germany bowed to the evidence that the fight against covid will not be won as long as there are “non-immunized gaps” – in the words of the outgoing Chancellor, Angela Merkel – such as those that persist in that country. Mandatory vaccination should be imposed. It will be done, predictably, in February. And, if Merkel still sits as a deputy in the Bundestag (Parliament), her vote would be in favor of that imposition. The chancellor, who like the rest of her conservative bloc and her Social Democratic coalition partners had always defended the voluntariness of the vaccine, thus admitted a turn that until recently seemed unthinkable. Merkel is expected to step down from power next week and will not hold any parliamentary seats. But he put on record what his hypothetical vote would be, after his last meeting with regional leaders and his expected successor, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.
The vaccine will be mandatory in a country where the rate of citizens with the complete regimen is 68.8% – below Spain or Portugal, among other European partners. Its authorities are considering administering 30 million doses – first, second or soft drink – in the remainder of the year. But until this happens and until the vaccination obligation takes effect, too many weeks will pass. The incidence for seven days and 100,000 inhabitants has decreased slightly in recent days, after months of continuous rise. However, it remains at very high levels, with 439.2 cases nationwide and above 1,100 in the most affected eastern districts.
Measures of national scope and immediate application are needed, agreed the outgoing foreign minister and her successor. Until now, severe restrictions were in place on a regional scale, both in the east and in Bavaria. The last meeting led by Merkel served to agree on unitary protocols, such as the closure of nightlife from incidence levels higher than 350 weekly cases. Access to non-essential shops will be restricted throughout the country to those vaccinated or healed. And meetings between unvaccinated people will be limited to people from the same nucleus of coexistence or two others from another nucleus.
Scholz thus assumed, de facto, the reins of the battle against COVID, a crisis that Merkel has not been able to resolve. The chancellor, who throughout her 16 years in power has faced so many other crises, from the euro to that of the refugees, will leave office at the worst moment of the pandemic for Germany. If in the first wave she was revalued as a leader of scientific training – she is a doctor in Physical Sciences – who knew how to convey complex concepts that other leaders did not succeed in understanding, in the second and third Germany was punished by peaks of deaths and infections, which only decreased after months of closure of public life.
The fourth wave has fallen with all its virulence in the first European power in the middle of the political relay. German authorities responded for weeks with tepid measures, as neighboring Austria and other partners applied lockdowns or moved toward mandatory vaccination.
Merkel, still acting Chancellor, was again criticized for what has been a constant in her exercise of power – late reactions. And to Scholz, having been too focused on negotiating his coalition with greens and liberals, instead of taking the lead already from his position as vice chancellor of the outgoing executive.
The formal handover of power will still take a few days. The scheduled date for Scholz’s inauguration is next Wednesday. Before that, on Saturday, his Social Democratic Party (SPD) must ratify the coalition pact. It will be followed on Sunday by the Liberal Party (FDP), in a similar format, from which its leader, Christian Lindner, hawk defender of the debt brake, will be formally appointed as finance minister.
Already on Monday, the Greens will announce the result of their consultation between the bases, with their co-president Robert Habeck as future super minister of Economy and Climate, and his double-headed comrade, Annalena Baerbock, as head of Foreign Affairs.
Scholz appointed the head of the crisis team against covid, Major General Carsten Creuer, already this week. But he has yet to present the list of the six ministers who correspond to his party. The most complex is Health, for which Karl Lauterbach, a leading expert in the entire pandemic crisis for German citizens, has been insistently considered. The objective of presenting a joint team between men and women speaks against him. Of the six positions to be designated by the SPD, three are fixed – that of Scholz, that of his Foreign Minister, for his henchman Wolfgang Schmidt, and that of Labor, for its outgoing incumbent, Hubertus Heil-. Scholz has no more room for another man, if he sticks to the goal of parity.
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