MMonday morning, 8 a.m. in the Chancellery. “Here comes the boss,” says the secretary, holding the elevator open. Wolfgang Schmidt slips in beaming. As effortlessly as the elevator glides up the seven floors, Schmidt glides through the elevator small talk: summer, sun, title finale. Only he himself didn’t have such a great weekend: cleaning up the basement.
But the head of the Chancellery can clean up. He constantly clears up disputes and misunderstandings in the government, clears up after others who leave the hall making a mess, concedes and rearranges until at some point a compromise is reached. Only in the last few weeks has he hardly been able to keep up. The traffic light chaos had become unmanageable.
As head of the Federal Chancellery, Schmidt has to deal with many egos. He coordinates the ministers in the cabinet and the prime ministers in the federal states. Like the director of an ensemble where everyone wants to be the lead. A director with a lot of power. Because the chancellor listens to him.
A special relationship
Schmidt is everything for Scholz: adviser and listener, brakeman and driver, critic and friend. Nobody makes it to the top alone. Merkel had Beate Baumann, Schröder had Frank-Walter Steinmeier. But there are few who have worked together as long and as closely as Schmidt and Scholz. “There’s always a basic tension between the two of them – that’s their secret,” says a friend.
The chancellor’s office is just a few steps away. Scholz is not there, otherwise there would be a bodyguard. Schmidt doesn’t need men like that because hardly anyone recognizes him on the street. Much influence, little fame. For Schmidt “the best of both worlds”.
When Schmidt took over the office from Helge Braun, he first rearranged the desk. Otherwise, he keeps things different from his predecessors. While Braun and Altmaier explained the Chancellor’s course on talk shows, Schmidt acted in the background. He calls it “role-adequate”. The idea behind it is that politics can be perfectly organized if everyone knows their roles. Unfortunately, they don’t always know everyone or play several at once. And suddenly you have a government crisis.
The Chancellor also has Schmidt to thank for the fact that this has now been settled. Just why only now? While the Greens and FDP argued over the heating law for three months, the chancellor remained silent for a long time. And the country asked: Shouldn’t he speak a word of authority? Shouldn’t he show the FDP its limits? The Greens had a bad suspicion: the Chancellery was letting the dispute run its course in order to damage Habeck, the Chancellor’s final opponent in the next election.
“Nonsense,” says Schmidt and starts to explain in detail. But because Schmidt is a background man, you can’t directly quote from it. Only so much: “Experience is that it usually does little to find a solution to talk about each other in public.” That’s the problem with the power words. And in addition to the authority to set guidelines, there is also the departmental principle. Not so easy in a coalition of three self-confident partners.
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