FThings are going really well for Nancy Faeser. She sits in a small café in downtown Frankfurt, sips her coffee cup, is silent most of the time and smiles as if she doesn’t trust it all yet. Eight well-known and lesser-known people, including the drag queen Babsi Heart and the left-wing lawyer Seda Başay Yildiz, shower Faeser with praise: she is the “personified firewall against the right”, a politician who unites instead of dividing “very good, very worthy candidate” and must become the first female Prime Minister of Hesse in the state elections on October 8th. So together they sign an election manifesto for them.
The SPD’s top candidate pauses for a moment and then says: “It’s very touching for me to receive so many compliments.” Afterwards, photos are taken, people chat, Faeser laughs her Faeser laugh – loud, warm, engaging. She talks about a facility for elderly people where she was before. Wonderful people, she was completely charged by the good atmosphere there and here. The election campaign in general – great. If you watch Nancy Faeser talking to people, everything is fine at first. At first glance, Faeser is like her laugh: warm, loud, engaging. And the problems of her election campaign? She acts like she doesn’t even understand the question. “What do you mean?”
From Berlin and Brussels to Hanau and Baunatal
There are the poll numbers of her party, the SPD: a few days before the state elections, she is separated by 15 percentage points from the CDU. She’s knocked off. There is Faeser’s own role as Federal Minister of the Interior: The number of migrants coming to Germany is increasing, the municipalities are groaning, a European deal is to be negotiated in Brussels – and Faeser is responsible. Her job as a minister could hardly be managed in a 40-hour week, even without an election campaign.
But there is also the election campaign, in which she is touring through Hesse: from Berlin and Brussels she goes to Schwalbach, Homburg, Baunatal, Hanau, Offenbach, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt. Back and forth, a tough job. At times, Faeser seems like a driven person. Contradictions arise under pressure: first she was against stationary border controls for weeks, then no longer. No contradiction to her previous position, she assures. As is often the case, it is said to be a misunderstanding of her listeners, not her own.
Such misunderstandings also happen to Faeser’s party. The election program stated that foreigners who have lived in Hesse for at least six months should have the right to vote at the local level. As it later turned out, the party only wants to ensure that foreigners are allowed to vote in cities and municipalities after six years. A “silly mistake,” said her spokesman, and she herself spoke of a “transmission error” from the position paper to the election program.
When the SPD published a video last weekend asking whether Prime Minister Boris Rhein wanted to use votes from the AfD – he had expressly ruled it out – she said: “That’s not my style.” The video was deleted, the general secretary of the The national association apologized. But Faeser insisted on the question that was also raised in the video: why a Hessian CDU politician met with AfD people for a kind of conference in Wetzlar. Rhein was annoyed that Faeser was putting her own apology into perspective. In Nancy Faeser’s world, mistakes apparently only exist when she names them as such. And she doesn’t like doing that.
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