AJuli Zeh welcomes the Federal Chancellor as the “most maligned man in the Republic”. To add at the same time that she is surprised “that there are people who still do this shitty job”. The writer wants to know from the Chancellor how one can still have confidence when one is being criticized so harshly. He speaks of his inner peace, his inner compass and the conviction that “if you do the right things, you will get approval in the end.” However, things are currently looking very bad for Scholz in terms of approval. “I have to say that now,” he adds self-deprecatingly.
But that evening in the fully occupied Nikolaisaal in Potsdam, Scholz was not booed. The audience in attendance is rather favorable to him, and his conversation partner, a Brandenburg resident with an SPD party membership, treats him with sympathy when it comes to his poor grades among the population. She couldn't forget a single bad criticism every time, even if there were 99 positive reactions at the same time. “Do you feel the same way or is it my menopause?” she asks the Chancellor. The audience is having fun.
Scholz says that a big advantage of him is that he doesn't hold grudges. In another life he would never again speak to those who spoke ill of him. But that just doesn't work in his life. “I’ll meet her again the next morning,” he says, enjoying his joke. But what worries him are the “falsifications” in the reporting. When he recently visited the flood areas in Lower Saxony, a single woman complained, but a hundred affected people met him in a friendly manner. Nevertheless, a tabloid newspaper then used the woman's sentences as a headline. “That’s just the stupid thing about independent media,” says Zeh and people laugh. But basically she agrees with the Chancellor. Anyone who negates the “imperative of catastrophic discourse” and allows themselves optimism will be accused of not recognizing the seriousness of the situation in this world. This would prevent differentiated perspectives.
Scholz talks about the multiple crises of his time in office so far
Scholz agrees. “I try not to go along with it and say everything is bad.” He prefers to be optimistic, but is “panicked” to make sure he doesn’t seem “like a guy on drugs.” Scholz talks about the multiple crises he faced as chancellor, from the corona pandemic to Russia's war against Ukraine. After all, the evening is entitled “In times of upheaval”. Scholz also talks about new energy generation. If the increase in prosperity has been based on coal, gas and oil for 200 years, then one cannot pretend that doing without them would be “a walk in the park”. But Scholz is sure that he is right, even if it takes a while for everyone to notice. “We are taking a path where we will see in ten or twenty years that it will work.”
Juli Zeh lets the Chancellor get away with it. The qualified lawyer, who has also been a constitutional judge in Brandenburg for several years at the suggestion of the SPD, has already criticized many things that were currently the subject of the political debate. She warned about the German surveillance state including biometric ID cards, about the weakening of basic rights due to the lockdowns in the corona pandemic, and in 2022 she signed an appeal against arms deliveries to Ukraine – all things that Scholz would not approve of. But that evening it takes time before she confronts Scholz with a key question. Many citizens have the impression that politicians are no longer up to their task. They expected more leadership, “we hear that from you in particular”. So the question is: does there need to be a new tone of voice? Is there a need for different communication?
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